Re: GPLv3 or later -- Lispref files refers to text in lispref.text

SL Baur writes: But you have no paper to prove it. Your testimony would count in court, but I doubt it would stand up to a Darryl McBride waving an employment contract that one of our contributors had signed. Nope. You can attack that on two grounds. First, the FSF claims it *is* a derived work, but that depends on the legal theory that dynamic linking infects the source code which does not contain a copy of any GPLed work. Many lawyers disagree, and it has *never* been tested in court. Personally, I think if it were, the GPL would become redundant, because the court would decide that legally it means the same thing as the LGPL. But that's just an opinion. Second, the GPL quite clearly disclaims any such thing as an automatic GPLing of a work. If you distribute a GPL derivative without GPLing it, then you lose all your GPL rights to the original. But your work does not become GPL unless you say so, with the consequence that if you don't, both you and all your downstream must stop redistributing those parts of the work that are yours. Definitely not if you're not a lawyer. Me, I make assumptions safely when proving theorems. I don't consider any other assumption safe (especially not the assumption that Xlib calls documented by X.org as non-blocking won't block, but that's another rant). Yes, but it doesn't matter because the manuals are licensed under nameless (and therefore *not* upgradable) predecessor to the God- Forsaken Documentation License. BTW, Larry the lawyer says it's trivial to revoke assign.future if you want to. It might even be possible to revoke the assignment of past code on the basis that you never got your dollar (at least, I never got mine, and they didn't even ask if I cared), but the FSF would surely fight in court; it would be very expensive. I don't think that's worth it. If that's necessary we may as well just nuke it and start from scratch. But if we're going to start over, I'd prefer to use a system like doxygen or whatever and blow off the FSF manuals, instead working from the FSF docstrings (and GPLing our manuals in the process). It shouldn't be necessary, though. Ben has not been in touch for years, but he has always been happy to relicense to anything that would be useful. He also offered to assign all his documentation stuff to the FSF if they would let us use GFDLed Emacs docs under the nameless license. Stallman was a mild jerk about it (ie, he reiterated his usual demand that the FSF review every line proposed for relicensing), Ben got huffy, and then it was a contest to see who could be the bigger jerk until Stallman said "No docs for XEmacs or anybody who looks like you!" <sigh /> _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta