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

David Kastrup wrote: I think because contributing a piece of work implicitly means that you agree to distribute it under the _current_ license. So, to relicense a piece of contributed work, you need an agreement from the author, either got in advance (like FSF copyright assignment includes) or got right before the license change. Since XEmacs has many contributors who hold their copyright, this means that license switch would require collecting agreements from all of them, which might be practically impossible. That said, I agree with you that this is mostly an XEmacs problem, largely caused by their policy of not collecting copyright assignments. The situation is not nice, but I don't see why FSF should go against its decision and its policies. As Robert Chassell said (or meant), FSF cannot ask other to use GFDL if it doesn't use it itself. After all, XEmacs isn't fully cooperative either, since FSF won't merge in non-assigned code. Yes, this is not a legal problem, but a matter of FSF policy, but still... Paul Pogonyshev