From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Robert J. Chassell" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel,gmane.emacs.xemacs.beta Subject: Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 16:53:51 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: References: <87llc49kn1.fsf@floss.red-bean.com> <6.2.0.14.2.20041212125027.024c6900@mail.comcast.net> Reply-To: bob@rattlesnake.com NNTP-Posting-Host: deer.gmane.org X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1102956995 18184 80.91.229.6 (13 Dec 2004 16:56:35 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 16:56:35 +0000 (UTC) Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, andy@xemacs.org, xemacs-beta@xemacs.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Mon Dec 13 17:56:26 2004 Return-path: Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by deer.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1CdtUo-00055D-00 for ; Mon, 13 Dec 2004 17:56:26 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.33) id 1Cdteq-0003dp-KP for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 13 Dec 2004 12:06:48 -0500 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.33) id 1Cdtdj-0003IO-2R for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 13 Dec 2004 12:05:39 -0500 Original-Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.33) id 1Cdtdg-0003Gr-F8 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 13 Dec 2004 12:05:37 -0500 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.33) id 1Cdtdf-0003Ga-H6 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 13 Dec 2004 12:05:35 -0500 Original-Received: from [69.168.110.189] (helo=rattlesnake.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.34) id 1CdtTS-00023F-J2 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:55:02 -0500 Original-Received: by rattlesnake.com via sendmail from stdin id (Debian Smail3.2.0.115) Mon, 13 Dec 2004 16:53:51 +0000 (UTC) Original-To: ttn@glug.org In-reply-to: (message from Thien-Thi Nguyen on Mon, 13 Dec 2004 07:34:37 -0500) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:31071 gmane.emacs.xemacs.beta:17443 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:31071 To focus on Emacs when we are talking about licenses suggests to me that you are more concerned with the development of that product than with changing the political and business patterns of societies. you are falling victim to a false dichotomy. the xemacs programmers are certainly a society, ... My apologies. I thought I was being clear: the society to which I am referring is the larger society, at the very least that of Europe and North America. Yes, the xemacs programmers are certainly a society, but that is not the one about which I am talking. As I said earlier, Sun, 12 Dec 2004 16:07:52 +0000 (UTC) ... the entire purpose of a legal license is to provide an interface between those who know something about the subject and the vastly larger outside world. The xemacs society is certainly not the `vastly larger outside world'. I went on to say, Sun, 12 Dec 2004 19:43:59 +0000 (UTC) ... the issue here is the interface between certain professionals in one industry and everyone else. ... people who are not programmers and who do not know anything about computers or code. .... Certainly, licenses are irrelevant to people who live in small communities. In a small community, social pressure and personal knowledge works well. 25 years ago, Unix and Lisp programmers lived in such a community or many of them did. I think many programmers wish they still lived in such a community. But the wider world has intervened. Programming and its machines have become successful. Even my grand-neice uses a computer. We do not live in a small and isolated community any more. That larger society is the one to which I am referring, not to the society of xemacs programmers, all of whom know about computers and code. ... a concept too vague to be useful ... But we are talking about business models and their supporting laws. These are NOT vague. An organization has at least three options, none vague: 1. Should the organization generate revenue by lowering its output and raising its price, and ensuring it can do that through law? That is what a `Creative Commons license with a commercial restriction' or one similar encourages. 2. Or should the organization generate revenue by increasing its output and selling more ... and also permit others to free ride on its unrecoverable costs, like attention getting, so it never undertakes the action in the first place? That is what the GNU GPL encourages for documentation. 3. Or, considering the GFDL, should the organization generate revenue by increasing its output and selling more ... and also permit competition, but with what I hope is the `right amount' of restriction -- enough so the initiating organization can recover costs so it will undertake actions but not so much that the initiating organization can legally prevent any income-related competition as it can with a `Creative Commons license with a commercial restriction'. It is worth saying again: a license on information is an interface between certain professionals in one industry and everyone else. The professionals may be software documentation writers or musicians or others. An intermediate organization may gather attention for their work and publish it using resources that are not recoverable. (This is different from publishing on a hard disk, which you can readily erase.) Depending on the license, other people and other organizations may deal with the same information. The wider society sets up default ground rules and default assumptions. In decades past, when the cost of publishing was higher than it is now, and when major technological advances were funded and controlled in the US by oligopolies, the default ground rule was that the oligopolies controlled the people and prevented other organizations from doing anything exactly similar to what they did. That meant a competing oligopolist had to `invent around' the issue, which was not too expensive for the oligopolist, but costly enough to keep out most competitors. (This is according to a study I read years ago; I can hunt up the reference if you want. The study was published on paper in the 1970s or '80s and never put on the Web.) The goal of the GNU project is to change the wider society's default ground rules and default assumptions. The new rules and assumptions are those in which professionals, like the xemacs developers, are legally permitted to cooperate and in which intermediate organizations may legally be created and may legally act. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc