Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 10:27:39 +0000 (GMT)
From: Alan Mackenzie <acm(a)muc.de>
Cc: emacs-devel(a)gnu.org, xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org
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 think you are taking the ``free'' part too literally. Free Software
or Free Documentation does not necessarily mean that you are ``free''
to do whatever you want with it. For example, the GPL says that your
freedom is limited by the requirement to supply the sources together
with the binary.
So an argument that ``free'' means there are no limitations is an
invalid argument, IMHO. A better argument would be whether the
limitations of freedom imposed by the GFDL are justified by the goals
of the Free Software movement.