Re: Some ideas with Emacs

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2019-12-03, at 01:20, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

>> OK.  Does that mean that you only recommend "free" books to anyone?
>
> Not exactly, no, but when there are Free books available, I'll usually
> refrain from mentioning others in the same area.

I see.  The problem in this particular case is that no free books are
available in the same area (in fact, the only book available as of now
is Glickstein's "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions", which I think is not
very up-to-date - and I don't believe it is free, either).

>>> E.g. I could accept a license which states that any derivative work
>>> (translation or otherwise) needs to use a different title and/or clearly
>>> say not only that it's a derivative of your work but also that it is not
>>> your work.  Or something along these lines.
>> That sounds fairly reasonable to me, I guess.  Does GFDL work this way?
>
> I don't think so, but I'm not sure.  Maybe the invariant section can be
> used for that.
>
> I do vaguely remember some software using a license along those lines
> which said that any derivative had to use another name (TeX, maybe?).

Yes, TeX does such a thing.

> In some cases you can probably get similar results with a trademark,
> which seems to match the underlying intention of being able to protect
> your reputation.
>
>> I'm wondering whether there is some middle ground between CC-ND and GFDL
>> here.  For instance, one of the ideas I have would be to release a book
>> under a strict license, disallowing even copying verbatim, then under
>> CC-ND-something after, say, 3-5 years, and then GFDL after another 3-5
>> years.  This looks pretty fair to me.
>
> Along the lines of the Ghostscript system which used to release 1-year
> old versions under the GPL while keeping the bleeding edge
> proprietary, IIRC.

Yes, this is close.

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl