Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual

[Florian Weimer]

* David Kastrup:

> d) is it a good idea to change a large body of free software (like the
> GNU Emacs manual) to a different licence when it is well-known that
> substantial forks exist for which no licence change is possible, not
> least of all because the fork does not have the permission of the FSF
> to change the licence for old derived material to the GFDL, even in
> the case (which is not the current case) that they'd wanted to do it?

d) doesn't apply to the situation which sparked this discussion
because the Emacs manual hasn't been released under the GPL.  If the
XEmacs manual is GPLed, it's not a fork of the Emacs manual, because
the Emacs manual licensing terms have been GPL-incompatible since at
least 1992, probably even longer.

The widely held belief that the GFDL relicensing of the Emacs manual
introduced the GPL incompatibility (and invariant sections) is wrong.