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

How does this hand-waving address the difference between GPL and GFDL? The GFDL is designed to enable commercial publishers who print on paper or other material entity to survive. The GPL is not. The idea is that software development will be paid for by hardware companies, by trade associations, by governments, by universities, and by programmers whose material income does come from the project at hand. In other words, cost recovery for someone writing code is, or should be, different than cost recovery for someone getting attention for and printing a book written by another. At the moment, proprietary software companies and many documentation publishers depend on the same method of cost recovery, which is to say monopoly pricing enforced (ultimately, not most of the time) by police. Proprietary restrictions hinder both software creation and documentation writing. That is why I have said so often that the purpose of the GFDL is to provide an alternative to a `Creative Commons license with a commercial restriction' or similar license. As for a single license: I personally would like to see one rather than two or many, but I am not sure that is possible. Laws are written mostly by lawyers. Businesses that use software are often run by people who know nothing about software (and the business may have nothing to do with software except to use it as a tool -- it may train horses or something like that). Perhaps one license is possible. Then again, perhaps not. Incidentally, a great advantages of both the GPL and the GFDL is that they can be read, perhaps with difficulty, by non-lawyers, and mean more or less the same thing to them as to lawyers. (I am told that the main legality a non-lawyer like me needs to learn is that `derivative works' are defined by judges, most of whom know nothing about software. The meaning of `derivative work' cannot be specified in a license.) Readability means that programmers who do not wish to learn much law can grok the major interfaces between them and the wider world. Imagine if a programmer could not understand these interfaces without becoming a different person -- imagine if a programmer were in the same position as a typical politician, the one being unable to understand the interface, the other being unable to understand the software. It is hard enough right now to deal with these issues: doubtless you have noticed that almost all discussion by programmers is addressed to programmers' issues rather than to non-programmers' issues. Imagine it were worse. -- Robert J. Chassell bob(a)rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc