Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual

Robert> To focus on Emacs when we are talking about licenses Robert> suggests to me that you are more concerned with the Robert> development of that product than with changing the Robert> political and business patterns of societies. Not exactly. Emacs is only part of my life, free software advocacy is only part of my life. In fact, living in a rather unfree (though very comfortable) society, software freedom is only a small part of the libertarian advocacy I should engage in. I prefer the simplicity of advocating the _quality_ of free software by producing it and giving it away, and of advocating the _extension_ of software freedom by _talking_ about it and engaging in other political behavior, separately from development. To me, the Emacs or XEmacs license is an instrument to enable sharing, no more, no less. It's not part of advocacy for me; I'm equally happy with whatever free upstream license, permissive or copyleft. It distresses me that licensing issues (and related legal flummery), however necessary, get in the way of sharing. You can mix advocacy with development if you like; I'm happy that you are free to do so. Nor do I speak for Andy, or need to. I don't know what he thinks he's doing, and it doesn't matter to me as long as we can share the code. Different people doing things different ways: that's freedom. That's good. Robert> An organization has at least three options, none vague: I am sorry, but although some of what you write about the business and socioeconomic environment in this passage is accurate, much is quite inadequate. Especially beware of false trichotomies, the CC-with- commercial-restriction does not fit any of the options as written. Robert> The goal of the GNU project is to change the wider Robert> society's default ground rules and default assumptions. Which is why using the label "free" for a license that permits self- serving restrictions was a strategic mistake IMHO. I really don't see a correspondingly large gain to offset the very real reputational damage, eg among Debian community members. It doesn't make any difference for XEmacs; the existing doc license will forever be incompatible with any strong copyleft but itself. But personally I wish the FSF would amend the GFDL to remove the additional encumbering restrictions, or simply rename it the GNU Documentation License: "The GDL is a not-too-unfree documentation license that reserves certain non-economic rights to authors, while perpetually protecting the freedoms it does provide for users. We use it ourselves to ensure that our advocacy of freedom always accompanies our documentation, while users will always be able to adapt the documentation to the needs of their derivatives of our free software." Still unfree, but very hard to get upset about when you put it that way.:-) "Do I contradict myself? Very well then; I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." -- W. Whitman, Song of Myself --