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

Bruce> As far as I can tell the XEmacs people aren't asking for Bruce> GNU GPL; the XEmacs manual is distributed under conditions Bruce> which look incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is correct. We are not asking for the GPL. We are asking for the GNU Emacs (v19, I think) documentation license, which was, unfortunately for the current situation, anonymous and unversioned. I think of this license as approximately a special case of the GFDL. Because both require that any redistribution take place under terms _identical_ to the original, they are, however, mutually incompatible. Whatever the FSF might decide to do with its policy on documentation licenses, it shouldn't revert to a license that can only be specified by quoting the whole thing; it would be asking for this situation all over again. So no matter how you slice it, XEmacs would require an specific sublicense from the FSF to incorporate portions of GNU Emacs documents in the XEmacs documentation. Bruce> So presumably in 2000 the FSF chose to change the license, Bruce> and the XEmacs people didn't follow, either because they Bruce> didn't like the GFDL or because they felt they couldn't Bruce> (changing licences is obviously easier if one entity owns Bruce> the copyright). As far as I know, it didn't occur to us to change the license. There was no discussion that I can recall until perhaps two years later, which came to the obvious conclusion that changing the license was impractical, and the discussion was immediately dropped. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.