Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual
At 11:43 AM 12/12/2004, Robert J. Chassell wrote:
Why is it not possible? Are you suggesting that the XEmacs people
lack proper papers for contributions? If so, this means they cannot
ever ensure that the lawyers of a hostile organization with plenty of
money will tell the organization's leaders that the software is legal.
That is what I think you are suggesting.
That's either amusing or insulting. XEmacs explicitly does not collect
papers because we believe that hinders development of the product. The only
reason we have tried to collect papers is promote greater cooperation with
the GNU Emacs project.
This means that the XEmacs project is rhetorically ineffective.
Since
I doubt that many people on it are concerned about business patterns,
politics and the like, I do not think this issue is salient to them.
I think they are mainly concerned with programming and wish the wider
world would go away.
Please do not make assumptions about we are or are not concerned with. If
anything the XEmacs project is much more concerned with these things than
the FSF appears to be.
I personally believe that the FSF's approach has contributed to making
Emacs (and XEmacs) largely irrelevant today. So you can protect the code
from big, bad companies - I highly doubt that anyone in the real world
actually cares anymore.
andy