Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual
What is the purpose of the GFDL? I quote from the licence:
"The purpose
of this License is to make a manual .... "free" in the sense of
freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and
redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or
noncommercially." Since the XEmacs team's freedom here is ineffective,
the GFDL is, on its own terms, broken.
I have no real opinion on the GFDL, tho just because of the turmoil it has
caused and is still causing, I guess I'm rather annoyed by it.
But I think that this "freedom" argument is flawed. "Freedom" means
something different to everyone, so it's not a very good way to convince
other people. Especially in the context of the Free Software movement,
I understand "free" to apply to the program itself, not its user:
the program (or the doc) itself is "free", can't be harnessed/hijacked by
anyone. It quite directly implies that people aren't "free" to use it as
they please.
I don't see any benefit from using the GFDL over the GPL that would justify
the downside of preventing the XEmacs people from using our documentation.
[ Unless we consider that as an upside, but I really don't see any good
reason why we should be so antagonizing. ] Similarly, the licensing problems
it can cause when extracting docs and doc-skeletons out of code
is worrisome.
Stefan