Stephen> I guess in the packages we do need to look for GFDL Stephen> specifically, and in the XEmacs core documentation, for the Stephen> unnamed doc license. Please feel free to look through the files and point out any licens identification patterns that it would be worth while for the script to search for. Yours -- %% Mats _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

Rodney Sparapani writes: Then legally all your downstreams are on shaky ground in redistributing them. It is representative, though. Most distributors of free software are really pirates at heart, and play fast and loose with licensing minutiae. When Emacs itself was relicensed, they discovered a couple of dozen problems, despite decades of care with licensing. That depends in general. Since OOo is open source, no, not the OOo license. Output of a program is not restricted by open source licenses. If you use the typical GPL permission "ESS is free software under the GPL" in most project files, then any files lacking explicit notice of license somewhere in the project documentation are implicitly under GPL, unless they are generated and the sources are under a different copyleft, in which case the source's license would rule. The .doc file format admits metadata; Microsoft being strong supporter of intellectual property rights, I'm sure a copyright notice can be placed in a doc file, both as metadata and (obviously) as part of the text to be displayed to readers. Isn't it obvious? We're dealing with restrictive licenses, we should obey those licenses as a matter of principle. In the case of FSF-owned software, we need to be especially careful since RMS has no love for us, and the FSF has proved itself willing to bully people into submission by threatening them with court action even when it has a weak legal case. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

Rodney Sparapani writes: "Downstream" is anybody who redistributes your files, whether XEmacs, Ubuntu, Microsoft, or your sister-in-law. They need your explicit permission. That's what "all rights reserved" means, and *all* rights reserved *is* the default under copyright law. Without an explicit permission, anybody who copies, redistributes, etc is infringing copyright. No piracy is taking place; I just mean that most free software distributors disagree with the whole idea of copyright and think that the content of software should be free for the taking once you have acquired a physical copy. No, the generator does not matter at all in open source/free software, because they never impose conditions on running the software. Copyright law itself only applies to copying the software. If the software is not copied into the output, copyright law doesn't care. The way that generators control output is by contract. Copyright law is what gives the vendor a monopoly on the software. They use this monopoly to get you to contract (aka EULA) about things that copyright law doesn't touch, such as whether you can run the program (per-seat licensing) and whether the output is restricted somehow. Again, no such contractual provision is ever present in free software by definition (and the RMS/Moglen take is that the GPL is not a contract). No, that's incorrect. The principle (and this only applies to GPL and other copyleft licenses) is that if you copy any portion of a GPLed work into another work, that latter work must be GPL. Now, since "ESS" is considered a single work under copyright law, and you received code under the GPL (eg, from Tony), all of ESS must be redistributed under the GPL. But wait! maybe it's not a single work, maybe it's a "mere aggregation" of several works. Specifically, code and documentation. Then the code and the documentation can have different licenses. It's not piracy to release them. *You* have no problems. But it's copyright infringement for recipients to redistribute them without permission. See http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/index.php?page=warez, specifically with reference to Dan Bernstein, for an explanation of why this causes trouble. As long as ESS uses just one license (possibly with version restrictions), there is no real problem. Implicitly those files are GPL, because ESS is GPL. It's only if there are conflicting licenses (such as GPL and GFDL) involved, then you have to figure out where the boundary between content covered by GPL and content covered by GFDL is. That is hard in a self-documenting program like Emacs (which is why I dislike the GFDL). No, not at all. The price has nothing to do with freedom. Personally, I would prefer not to, and I think that is true of most XEmacs developers (I do not claim to speak for them, that's just my impression). There are terms in GPLv3 I do not like, and I would not want my downstream to be bound by them. However, if my upstream wants GPLv3, that is acceptable to me, and we will fix up our distribution as needed to conform to their wishes. No, we don't have to follow GPL v2. We have to follow the permission we were given. Normally for GPL code, that is "GPL Vn or later". That means we can change it to "GPL Vn ONLY", "GPL V(n+1) ONLY", "GPL Vn or V(n+1) ONLY", or (most usually) "GPL V(n+1) or later". _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

Rodney Sparapani <rsparapa(a)mcw.edu&gt; writes: A lawyer is someone versed in the psychology of judge and jury. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta