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: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:32:58 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: References: <87llc49kn1.fsf@floss.red-bean.com> <6.2.0.14.2.20041212125027.024c6900@mail.comcast.net> <87d5xbd4it.fsf@tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> Reply-To: bob@rattlesnake.com NNTP-Posting-Host: deer.gmane.org X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1103153641 13247 80.91.229.6 (15 Dec 2004 23:34:01 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:34:01 +0000 (UTC) Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Thu Dec 16 00:33:53 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 1CeieW-0006x3-00 for ; Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:33:52 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.33) id 1Ceioj-0002Ep-BF for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 15 Dec 2004 18:44:25 -0500 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.33) id 1Ceio7-0002AQ-V3 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 15 Dec 2004 18:43:48 -0500 Original-Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.33) id 1Ceio6-000293-7W for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 15 Dec 2004 18:43:46 -0500 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.33) id 1Ceio6-00028S-0f for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 15 Dec 2004 18:43:46 -0500 Original-Received: from [69.168.110.189] (helo=rattlesnake.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.34) id 1Ceidq-0006lI-Td for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 15 Dec 2004 18:33:11 -0500 Original-Received: by rattlesnake.com via sendmail from stdin id (Debian Smail3.2.0.115) Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:32:58 +0000 (UTC) Original-To: emacs-devel@gnu.org, xemacs-beta@xemacs.org In-reply-to: (message from David Kastrup on Wed, 15 Dec 2004 21:19:08 +0100) 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:31184 gmane.emacs.xemacs.beta:17476 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:31184 Anyway, could we keep off the picturesque rhetoric? It is not merely picturesque rhetoric, it is true: you do not have to spend all your time supporting freedom to be a fellow who helps others. In the case of software, you can do this by choosing a license. Stephen J. Turnbull said ... free software advocacy is only part of my life ... and suggested, although he did not say so, that choosing a good license, and dealing with legal paperwork, takes a great deal of time. But that is not true. He framed the issue erroneously. We have two different problems: A) Emacs changed its manual licence from the old licence to the GFDL, and XEmacs can't or does not want to easily follow suit without contacting _their_ contributors. Right. Andy Piper said that XEmacs explicitly does not collect papers because we believe that hinders development of the product. which means that XEmacs depends on `security by obscurity'. This means that if XEmacs becomes widely used, this policy may cause unanticipated trouble. B) Both the old as well as the new Emacs manual licence are GPL-incompatible and thus present problems for integrating work on the manual and the code for derived works that are not copyrighted all by the same legal entity. That might be true. On the other hand, it might not -- waking up in the middle of the night, I realized that the legal right to modify that is inherent in both the GNU GPL and the GFDL may make it legal to integrate work between the two. I am not a lawyer and I don't know. In my remarks I have been focusing on the invariant issues, the `freedoms from', rather than on the `freedoms to'. But the `freedoms to' are also important. I cannot tell you one way or the other. (As far as I am concerned, this is a bug, and I am glad you showed it to me. Like the GNU GPL, the GFDL should be understandable by lay people with only a little legal knowledge and not much patience. It is not.) It would appear to me that "A" is not something that we can reasonably deal with in isolation: if we accompany every change of the licence of the Emacs manual with an exception for old times' sakes, there is no point in changing the licence in the first place. True. However, A is in some manner an outgrowth of problem B, and if we got B solved in a satisfactory way, it might mean that XEmacs developers (like everybody else) would need to adapt at most _one_ more time. Maybe. But more likely more than one more time. That is because of the people who think that software and its documentation should be restricted. They will not `leave well enough alone'. They will do something that forces us to react. If, for example, the GPL depends on copyright, then anti-GPL people will say, get rid of copyright for software! (There is an effort to do just this in the US.) Companies such as Microsoft own thousands of patents. Patents enable worse restrictions than copyright. (There is an effort to introduce software patents into Europe, even though the European parliament has voted against them.) Moreover, some of people who are against software freedom can can readily afford to fund think tanks, books, legal cases, patents, lobbying, and FUD. An anti-free software person who has the money need not spend his time on the issue. This means the conflict will be ongoing. And then there are mistakes on our side. As you say, there is ... no reason to cheer the good guys when they are shooting themselves and their friends in the foot. The GNU GPL took a long time to become accepted. The language for it sometimes failed. It is like RMS still calling Emacs an editor, when it is an integrated computational environment that offers editing facilities, just as BASH offers editing facilities in VIM or KDE offers them in Koffice. There are failures on several sides. People like me not explaining well enough. RMS not explaining well enough. Another group are people like Andy Piper, who said I highly doubt that anyone in the real world actually cares anymore. which suggests that all this licensing activity is a waste of time. I do not know how to talk to people like Andy. The question is how you view the world: do you figure that the non-programmers you must deal with are entirely, rather than mostly, helpful and friendly? Or do you figure that a few are not so good? I am talking to people who think the latter, but not the former. Or do you avoid thinking about non-programmers with reference to programming? I don't know how to talk with such people since I look on licenses as an interface to non-programmers. On the long run, I'd hope that the next version of the GPL would become suitable to cover the generated of printed manuals in a satisfactory way without the need for a separate licence. I would like that. But I am not sure it is legally possible or rhetorically useful. After all, the purpose of the GFDL is to ensure more freedom over all, and `freedom from' monopolies by permitting certain publishers a limited `freedom to'. That kind of attempted balancing does not occur in the GNU GPL. Put another way, you seldom buy a book for its paper, you buy it for what specifically is printed in it. Books are sold for their content (not, as the jokes have it, for their covers; people are influenced by covers because they expect them to indicate content). On the other hand, a computer is sold for its hardware, not for its software. There is reason to separate the GFDL from the GPL. (As for embedded systems: it may be hard to change the software in an embedded computer system like one in a car, but it is easy to change the software in its parent computer. Embedded computer systems are not like books; they are not sold for their contained software. On the other hand, their software is more permanent than in desktop computers. So embedded systems form yet another category although linked to its parents.) All of those choices don't look very appealing. I agree. It is not an appealing world. And it is getting worse. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc