* Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual @ 2004-12-09 22:28 Ben Wing 2004-12-10 23:14 ` Richard Stallman 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Ben Wing @ 2004-12-09 22:28 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel Richard -- The GNU Emacs user's manual has changed its license to the GFDL. The XEmacs manual has a different license -- the GPL. Because of contributions from various parties, we cannot easily change our license, and apparently there are incompatibilities between the GFDL and the GPL. Therefore I am wondering if you will give us permission to incorporate parts of the GNU Emacs manual under the existing XEmacs license, which reads Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. @ignore Permission is granted to process this file through Tex and print the results, provided the printed document carries copying permission notice identical to this one except for the removal of this paragraph (this paragraph not being relevant to the printed manual). @end ignore Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the sections entitled ``The GNU Manifesto'', ``Distribution'' and ``GNU General Public License'' are included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that the sections entitled ``The GNU Manifesto'', ``Distribution'' and ``GNU General Public License'' may be included in a translation approved by the author instead of in the original English. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-09 22:28 Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual Ben Wing @ 2004-12-10 23:14 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-11 0:59 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-11 10:27 ` Alan Mackenzie 0 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-10 23:14 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel The GNU Emacs user's manual has changed its license to the GFDL. The XEmacs manual has a different license -- the GPL. Because of contributions from various parties, we cannot easily change our license, Too bad. I won't relicense such a large amount of material all together. If you show me specific parts you would like to use, I will consider relicensing them. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* RE: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-10 23:14 ` Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-11 0:59 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-11 1:06 ` Miles Bader 2004-12-11 10:27 ` Alan Mackenzie 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Ben Wing @ 2004-12-11 0:59 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel > The GNU Emacs user's manual has changed its license to > the GFDL. The XEmacs > manual has a different license -- the GPL. Because of > contributions from > various parties, we cannot easily change our license, > > Too bad. I won't relicense such a large amount of material > all together. Given that this manual used to be under the exact same license, and that there are minimal differences between the two, and that XEmacs is a free software project completely in the spirit of the "GNU Manifesto", what is the problem? ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-11 0:59 ` Ben Wing @ 2004-12-11 1:06 ` Miles Bader 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Miles Bader @ 2004-12-11 1:06 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, rms, xemacs-beta On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 06:59:50PM -0600, Ben Wing wrote: > Given that this manual used to be under the exact same license, and that > there are minimal differences between the two, and that XEmacs is a free > software project completely in the spirit of the "GNU Manifesto", what is > the problem? If the entire manual was made available under the GPL as well, it would sort of make using the GDFL a bit pointless, no? -Miles -- If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. [George Carlin] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-10 23:14 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-11 0:59 ` Ben Wing @ 2004-12-11 10:27 ` Alan Mackenzie 2004-12-11 18:19 ` Eli Zaretskii ` (3 more replies) 1 sibling, 4 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Alan Mackenzie @ 2004-12-11 10:27 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, xemacs-beta Hi, Richard and Ben, On Fri, 10 Dec 2004, Richard Stallman wrote: > The GNU Emacs user's manual has changed its license to the GFDL. > The XEmacs manual has a different license -- the GPL. Because of > contributions from various parties, we cannot easily change our > license, >Too bad. I won't relicense such a large amount of material all >together. There is irony in that sentence. >If you show me specific parts you would like to use, I will consider >relicensing them. I'm speaking as somebody who's put a significant amount of time into amending the Emacs manual (e.g. programs.texi). I did so under the impression that what I was amending was free, in the same sense that the Emacs Lisp that I contribute is free. Some time later, my attention was drawn to the details of the GFDL. Anybody wishing to use the contents of a GFD is obliged to copy the cover sheets of the original. This restriction seems analogous to one that, say, allows functions to be used for decoding a compressed graphic but not for encoding one. What is the purpose of the GFDL? I quote from the licence: "The purpose of this License is to make a manual .... "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially." Since the XEmacs team's freedom here is ineffective, the GFDL is, on its own terms, broken. I do not understand why the GFDL exists at all. It seems to me that the GPL is as adequate for manuals as it is for code. I also don't understand why the Emacs Manual's licence had to be changed - a prime effect of this change was to annul people's freedom to combine old bits of the manual with new bits. My feeling is that this is just not the way things should be in the free software community. Put bluntly, having made contributions to the Emacs manual, I feel duped. Yes, the GFDL conforms to the terms of the assignment papers I signed, but I don't think I should have to wave the small print past a lawyer before signing this sort of thing. Do I really want to make any more contributions to the Emacs manual? That's not just a rhetorical question. Richard, the GFDL is broken. Please get it fixed, in a way which will restore the XEmacs team's freedom to copy and modify the Emacs manual. -- Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany) ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-11 10:27 ` Alan Mackenzie @ 2004-12-11 18:19 ` Eli Zaretskii 2004-12-11 20:43 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-11 19:02 ` Stefan Monnier ` (2 subsequent siblings) 3 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Eli Zaretskii @ 2004-12-11 18:19 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, ben > Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 10:27:39 +0000 (GMT) > From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> > Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, xemacs-beta@xemacs.org > > What is the purpose of the GFDL? I quote from the licence: "The purpose > of this License is to make a manual .... "free" in the sense of > freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and > redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or > noncommercially." Since the XEmacs team's freedom here is ineffective, > the GFDL is, on its own terms, broken. I think you are taking the ``free'' part too literally. Free Software or Free Documentation does not necessarily mean that you are ``free'' to do whatever you want with it. For example, the GPL says that your freedom is limited by the requirement to supply the sources together with the binary. So an argument that ``free'' means there are no limitations is an invalid argument, IMHO. A better argument would be whether the limitations of freedom imposed by the GFDL are justified by the goals of the Free Software movement. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-11 18:19 ` Eli Zaretskii @ 2004-12-11 20:43 ` David Kastrup 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-11 20:43 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: ben, Alan Mackenzie, emacs-devel, xemacs-beta "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org> writes: >> Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 10:27:39 +0000 (GMT) >> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> >> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, xemacs-beta@xemacs.org >> >> What is the purpose of the GFDL? I quote from the licence: "The >> purpose of this License is to make a manual .... "free" in the >> sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy >> and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either >> commercially or noncommercially." Since the XEmacs team's freedom >> here is ineffective, the GFDL is, on its own terms, broken. > > I think you are taking the ``free'' part too literally. Free > Software or Free Documentation does not necessarily mean that you > are ``free'' to do whatever you want with it. For example, the GPL > says that your freedom is limited by the requirement to supply the > sources together with the binary. > > So an argument that ``free'' means there are no limitations is an > invalid argument, IMHO. A better argument would be whether the > limitations of freedom imposed by the GFDL are justified by the > goals of the Free Software movement. And that, in my opinion, is not just a question about the GFDL itself, but also what it is being applied to. Personally, I consider it a good thing that the GFDL as an option for authors exists: if I were to write a book with non-trivial non-technical value, a book with a topic of its own, I'd consider the GFDL a good choice to have that would be good for preserving parts of my author's interest in the integrity of the work. But while I like its availability where I consider it appropriate, I think that it should not be applied to reference material intended to accompany software distributions: it makes no sense to not be able to copy examples and passages freely between doc strings and manual. Of course, the sole copyright owner of the material (like the FSF is for its key project) _can_ do that, but it means that the project as a whole is no longer governed by the spirit of a public licence: we now have only a _single_ party that is allowed to manage the operations needed to sensibly maintain the project as a whole. Since combined GFDL/GPL projects break the spirit of a public licence in, I consider the GFDL licence the wrong choice for material that is basically maintained by the same set of authors and in the same manner (CVS or whatever) together with GPLed software. This would probably hold for the majority of documentation in Texinfo format, with possibly some arguable exceptions where a whole project is done _completely_ under the GFDL, like some LaTeX references are, even though the lack of ability for freely copying example code from and back to GPLed projects might also apply here. Of course it would be pointless to distribute the Emacs Lisp manual under the GFDL while giving the XEmacs team full licence to use it under the GPL. I agree with that. But I also think that the Emacs Lisp manual is a prime example of a manual that should be available under the GPL outright to begin with, because it evolves together with and inseparable from Emacs, and having it under a different licence means that we use copyright for throwing a permanent monkey wrench for maintenance into any forks of the project not done by the copyright owner itself, defeating the "public" in the "GNU General Public Licence". -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-11 10:27 ` Alan Mackenzie 2004-12-11 18:19 ` Eli Zaretskii @ 2004-12-11 19:02 ` Stefan Monnier 2004-12-12 0:26 ` Karl Fogel 2004-12-12 13:31 ` Matthew Mundell 2004-12-12 2:03 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-12 4:39 ` Richard Stallman 3 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Stefan Monnier @ 2004-12-11 19:02 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, Richard Stallman, Ben Wing > What is the purpose of the GFDL? I quote from the licence: "The purpose > of this License is to make a manual .... "free" in the sense of > freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and > redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or > noncommercially." Since the XEmacs team's freedom here is ineffective, > the GFDL is, on its own terms, broken. I have no real opinion on the GFDL, tho just because of the turmoil it has caused and is still causing, I guess I'm rather annoyed by it. But I think that this "freedom" argument is flawed. "Freedom" means something different to everyone, so it's not a very good way to convince other people. Especially in the context of the Free Software movement, I understand "free" to apply to the program itself, not its user: the program (or the doc) itself is "free", can't be harnessed/hijacked by anyone. It quite directly implies that people aren't "free" to use it as they please. I don't see any benefit from using the GFDL over the GPL that would justify the downside of preventing the XEmacs people from using our documentation. [ Unless we consider that as an upside, but I really don't see any good reason why we should be so antagonizing. ] Similarly, the licensing problems it can cause when extracting docs and doc-skeletons out of code is worrisome. Stefan ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-11 19:02 ` Stefan Monnier @ 2004-12-12 0:26 ` Karl Fogel 2004-12-12 8:57 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 13:31 ` Matthew Mundell 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Karl Fogel @ 2004-12-12 0:26 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: Alan Mackenzie, emacs-devel, Richard Stallman, xemacs-beta Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes: > I don't see any benefit from using the GFDL over the GPL that would justify > the downside of preventing the XEmacs people from using our documentation. > [ Unless we consider that as an upside, but I really don't see any good > reason why we should be so antagonizing. ] Similarly, the licensing problems > it can cause when extracting docs and doc-skeletons out of code > is worrisome. I agree. It is bad that our docs are license-incompatible with XEmacs's GPL'd docs. It is also confusing how the GFDL interacts with extracted docs from non-GFDL code, as you point out. In general, the GFDL's requirements take a great deal of time and concentration to understand (this is heard so often, from so many, that I trust it is uncontroversial now). This makes the GFDL problematic for reference documentation like the Emacs manual, because such documentation gets small, lightweight contributions from many different people. The burden of simply *understanding* the GFDL significantly raises the overhead of making an individual contribution. I am reluctant to contribute to the Emacs manual under the GFDL. I feel like my contributions are going into a restrictive pool, where many will not be able to make use of them. Apparently, Alan Mackenzie feels this way too. I wonder how many others? No one who works on Emacs would be reluctant to contribute to a GPL'd manual, I'll bet. -Karl ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 0:26 ` Karl Fogel @ 2004-12-12 8:57 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 16:56 ` Brian Palmer 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 8:57 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: Richard Stallman, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, Stefan Monnier, Alan Mackenzie Karl Fogel <kfogel@floss.red-bean.com> writes: > Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes: >> I don't see any benefit from using the GFDL over the GPL that would justify >> the downside of preventing the XEmacs people from using our documentation. >> [ Unless we consider that as an upside, but I really don't see any good >> reason why we should be so antagonizing. ] Similarly, the licensing problems >> it can cause when extracting docs and doc-skeletons out of code >> is worrisome. > > I agree. > > It is bad that our docs are license-incompatible with XEmacs's GPL'd > docs. It's bad for the XEmacs developers and other Emacs forks, irrelevant for us, since only FSF copyright assigned contributions are accepted into Emacs and its manual, anyway, and the copyright holder is free to move stuff between licences within the scope of the assignment contracts. > It is also confusing how the GFDL interacts with extracted docs from > non-GFDL code, as you point out. Again, this is not a problem for Emacs development itself (the copyright all being by the FSF), but for every fork of it. Which makes it appear to me as jibing with the idea of a Public Licence. As explained elsewhere, I do think the GFDL a good idea, but I don't like the implications of using it tightly coupled with GPLed software development. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 8:57 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 16:56 ` Brian Palmer 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Brian Palmer @ 2004-12-12 16:56 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 09:57:56 +0100, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote: > Karl Fogel <kfogel@floss.red-bean.com> writes: > > > Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes: > >> I don't see any benefit from using the GFDL over the GPL that would justify > >> the downside of preventing the XEmacs people from using our documentation. > >> [ Unless we consider that as an upside, but I really don't see any good > >> reason why we should be so antagonizing. ] Similarly, the licensing problems > >> it can cause when extracting docs and doc-skeletons out of code > >> is worrisome. > > > > I agree. > > > > It is bad that our docs are license-incompatible with XEmacs's GPL'd > > docs. > > It's bad for the XEmacs developers and other Emacs forks, irrelevant > for us, since only FSF copyright assigned contributions are accepted > into Emacs and its manual, anyway, and the copyright holder is free to Not true, e.g., lao.el is Copyright (C) 1997 Electrotechnical Laboratory, JAPAN. I'm also going to say it's a bad thing for everybody, in second order effects if not primary. The more cooperation that exists between the many emacs forks out there, the more cooperation that can be built on. Emacs profits from that cooperation, too. The question that comes , then, is this obstacle to cooperation so very valuable to emacs? What is the net benefit of having the emacs manual only available under the GFDL? > move stuff between licences within the scope of the assignment > contracts. > > > It is also confusing how the GFDL interacts with extracted docs from > > non-GFDL code, as you point out. > > Again, this is not a problem for Emacs development itself (the > copyright all being by the FSF), but for every fork of it. And for every elisp application built on emacs. There are any number of elisp applications out there which will involve the authors looking through the emacs manual for reference. The GFDL status of the manual has clear implications on their ability to copy info out for docstrings or basing any functions on examples given in the manual. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-11 19:02 ` Stefan Monnier 2004-12-12 0:26 ` Karl Fogel @ 2004-12-12 13:31 ` Matthew Mundell 2004-12-12 13:40 ` David Kastrup 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Matthew Mundell @ 2004-12-12 13:31 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: Ben Wing, emacs-devel, Richard Stallman, xemacs-beta Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes: > But I think that this "freedom" argument is flawed. "Freedom" means > something different to everyone, so it's not a very good way to convince > other people. Especially in the context of the Free Software movement, > I understand "free" to apply to the program itself, not its user: > the program (or the doc) itself is "free", can't be harnessed/hijacked by > anyone. It quite directly implies that people aren't "free" to use it as > they please. That sounds more like the program is being protected than freed. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 13:31 ` Matthew Mundell @ 2004-12-12 13:40 ` David Kastrup 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 13:40 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, Stefan Monnier, Richard Stallman Matthew Mundell <matt@mundell.ukfsn.org> writes: > Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes: > >> But I think that this "freedom" argument is flawed. "Freedom" >> means something different to everyone, so it's not a very good way >> to convince other people. Especially in the context of the Free >> Software movement, I understand "free" to apply to the program >> itself, not its user: the program (or the doc) itself is "free", >> can't be harnessed/hijacked by anyone. It quite directly implies >> that people aren't "free" to use it as they please. > > That sounds more like the program is being protected than freed. Certainly. This protection is the whole point of copyleft licences as compared to licences like the MIT X11 licence or placing something in the public domain. This is not an issue: the various GNU licences never were aiming for the "most free in every sense of the word" award in the first place. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-11 10:27 ` Alan Mackenzie 2004-12-11 18:19 ` Eli Zaretskii 2004-12-11 19:02 ` Stefan Monnier @ 2004-12-12 2:03 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-12 4:59 ` Karl Fogel 2004-12-12 4:39 ` Richard Stallman 3 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-12 2:03 UTC (permalink / raw What is the purpose of the GFDL? The prime purpose of the GFDL is to encourage more publishers to provide commercial, free documentation. Publishers have told me that they are afraid that without some kind of legal obligation to publish a few words on the front and back covers they will be ripped off by free riders. Were they to invest in gathering people's attention, others would benefit. So they did not invest in providing commercial, free documentation. The strategy may be wrong. Businesses may not compete with one another. They may not care whether they lose revenue to free riders and others. But I do not think so. (Indeed, most of the free works I see nowadays in commercial publications are under more restrictive `Creative Commons' licenses, so there is an argument that the GFDL is not restrictive enough.) >From my knowledge, many businessmen fear that other businessmen will compete, one way or the other. For example, a long time ago Tim O'Reilly told me that he believed that powerful people in Macmillan hoped to destroy his publishing house before it became well established. Perhaps he was delusional. Or perhaps he was correct. I think he was more likely correct than wrong. In any event, others have said the same. The GFDL is designed to reduce the benefits to free riders. That is its prime purpose. (It has secondary purposes, too, like enabling people to write personal introductions that legally will remain invariant.) As I said, there is short term evidence that the GFDL is insufficiently restrictive; but I do not see how it could be made more restrictive and still be free in any meaningful sense. It is not pleasant to live in a world where good guys are hurt by bad guys, but that the way the world is. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 2:03 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-12 4:59 ` Karl Fogel [not found] ` <m1CdWGG-0004R2C@rattlesnake.com> 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Karl Fogel @ 2004-12-12 4:59 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel "Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: > The prime purpose of the GFDL is to encourage more publishers to > provide commercial, free documentation. > > Publishers have told me that they are afraid that without some kind of > legal obligation to publish a few words on the front and back covers > they will be ripped off by free riders. Were they to invest in > gathering people's attention, others would benefit. So they did not > invest in providing commercial, free documentation. > > The strategy may be wrong. Businesses may not compete with one > another. They may not care whether they lose revenue to free riders > and others. But I do not think so. (Indeed, most of the free works I > see nowadays in commercial publications are under more restrictive > `Creative Commons' licenses, so there is an argument that the GFDL is > not restrictive enough.) > > From my knowledge, many businessmen fear that other businessmen will > compete, one way or the other. For example, a long time ago Tim > O'Reilly told me that he believed that powerful people in Macmillan > hoped to destroy his publishing house before it became well > established. Perhaps he was delusional. Or perhaps he was correct. > I think he was more likely correct than wrong. In any event, others > have said the same. If O'Reilly was worried about this at one point, they've loosened up considerably. They're now happily publishing books under considerably *less* restrictive [than the GFDL] Creative Commons licenses -- licenses that do not have, for example, front- and back-cover requirements, or invariant portion requirements. > The GFDL is designed to reduce the benefits to free riders. That is > its prime purpose. (It has secondary purposes, too, like enabling > people to write personal introductions that legally will remain > invariant.) As I said, there is short term evidence that the GFDL is > insufficiently restrictive; but I do not see how it could be made more > restrictive and still be free in any meaningful sense. (Thanks for the summary of the GFDL's purposes -- very helpful!) An important question remains: Why is attractiveness to commercial publishers, or reducing benefits to free riders, important for the Emacs manual? If the Emacs manual were picked up by free riders, that would be fine with us, wouldn't it? (Is it that the FSF sells manuals? If so, how many copies do they sell anyway, and how much would that number be likely to be affected? Most people who contribute to the manual are not doing it to raise money for the FSF. They're doing it to contribute to Emacs. When I want to contribute to the FSF, I write a check. When I want to contribute to Emacs, I write code or docs.) So what exactly is the GFDL protecting, in the specific case of the Emacs manual? Are we really worried about some portion of the manual being used in a screed in support of software patents or something? ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
[parent not found: <m1CdWGG-0004R2C@rattlesnake.com>]
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual [not found] ` <m1CdWGG-0004R2C@rattlesnake.com> @ 2004-12-12 17:43 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 18:39 ` Florian Weimer 2004-12-12 19:43 ` Robert J. Chassell 0 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 17:43 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: kfogel, emacs-devel, xemacs-beta "Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: > Why is attractiveness to commercial publishers, or reducing > benefits to free riders, important for the Emacs manual? > > To enable the FSF to be a `do what we do organization' rather than a > `don't do what we do, do what we say' organization. [Lots of other explanation deleted] This is all very fine and explains the reason for both the GFDL and the GPL pretty much equally. It does not explain, however: a) what precise purpose does the GFDL achieve for the GNU Emacs manual that is not achieved by it being under the GPL (your explanation is mostly about the contrast to Public Domain and/or BSD)? b) is the difference this makes worth the trouble it causes? c) in particular: is it a good idea to split a free project into two parts with incompatible licences in a manner that makes it only possible for the copyright holder to sensibly maintain the exchange of material across the rift? Do we really want to demonstrate how to do such a thing in large scale? 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? In short, in this manner we are creating an insurmountable border for anybody but the FSF to past versions of the manual, as well as to current versions of the Emacs code. I don't like it. This has nothing to do with liking or not liking the GFDL itself: as I already stated it would probably be my preferred manner of publishing a book that was intended mainly for publishing in the first place, and that was not as tightly coupled with software as most Texinfo manuals are. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 17:43 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 18:39 ` Florian Weimer 2004-12-12 19:24 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 19:43 ` Robert J. Chassell 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Florian Weimer @ 2004-12-12 18:39 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: kfogel, bob, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel * 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 18:39 ` Florian Weimer @ 2004-12-12 19:24 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 19:49 ` Florian Weimer 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 19:24 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: kfogel, bob, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes: > * 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. So what is the actual situation with the licence of the XEmacs manual? What kind of licensing are they _free_ to place on the XEmacs manual without the possibility of XEmacs contributors vetoing that decision? This would give us some sort of idea whether the requirements of the XEmacs team can be accommodated in a manner that is not equivalent to returning to the old licensing conditions completely. > The widely held belief that the GFDL relicensing of the Emacs manual > introduced the GPL incompatibility (and invariant sections) is > wrong. Well, ok, so we just substituted one idea I don't like with another one. So what terms in the old licence were GPL-incompatible? And, putting back the XEmacs manual problem for a moment, do we have a reasonable chance to place the GPL on the manual source code in a sensible way, without causing insurmountable problems for printed manuals? I'd think that the problems with printed manuals from GPLed source might be somewhat similar to the problems with embedded controllers based upon GPLed source: in both cases the usual end product is used without accessing the source. There is a difference, though: in the case of the manual, the usual customer will _benefit_ from a machine-readable source code copy since he can then use text search and indexing and similar. Since this problem does not seem restricted to GNU Emacs and its printed manual, is there a more appropriate list where we could try discussing how to cope with the general problem that gets exhibited here? -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 19:24 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 19:49 ` Florian Weimer 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Florian Weimer @ 2004-12-12 19:49 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: kfogel, bob, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel * David Kastrup: > Well, ok, so we just substituted one idea I don't like with another > one. So what terms in the old licence were GPL-incompatible? For reference, the old license was: @ifinfo This file documents the GNU Emacs editor. Copyright (C) 1985, 1986, 1988, 1992 Richard M. Stallman. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. @ignore Permission is granted to process this file through Tex and print the results, provided the printed document carries copying permission notice identical to this one except for the removal of this paragraph (this paragraph not being relevant to the printed manual). @end ignore Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the sections entitled ``The GNU Manifesto'', ``Distribution'' and ``GNU General Public License'' are included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that the sections entitled ``The GNU Manifesto'', ``Distribution'' and ``GNU General Public License'' may be included in a translation approved by the author instead of in the original English. @end ifinfo Those invariant sections are GPL incompatible because they restrict modification in a rather drastic way. I don't really think that invariant sections are a good solution. If I don't want my users to read them, I can modify the Info viewer to hide them (or replace them with texts of my own), without actually changing the manual itself. > And, putting back the XEmacs manual problem for a moment, do we have a > reasonable chance to place the GPL on the manual source code in a > sensible way, without causing insurmountable problems for printed > manuals? In theory, one could dual-license it. However, this might undermine some goals of the GNU FDL. > Since this problem does not seem restricted to GNU Emacs and its > printed manual, is there a more appropriate list where we could try > discussing how to cope with the general problem that gets exhibited > here? There are already ongoing deliberations between the Debian Project and the FSF which deal with a very similar topic: the fact that the GNU FDL is definitely *not* a free software license (software in the sense of machine-executable code). However, these discussions seem to be stuck for some reason. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 17:43 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 18:39 ` Florian Weimer @ 2004-12-12 19:43 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-12 19:59 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 21:00 ` Andy Piper 1 sibling, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-12 19:43 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: kfogel, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel > To enable the FSF to be a `do what we do organization' rather than a > `don't do what we do, do what we say' organization. a) what precise purpose does the GFDL achieve for the GNU Emacs manual that is not achieved by it being under the GPL (your explanation is mostly about the contrast to Public Domain and/or BSD)? To be a `do what we do, not a do what we say' organization. b) is the difference this makes worth the trouble it causes? I think so. Certainly, over the past few years lawyers have become very important in the question of software and other freedoms. As the cost of manufacturing information, which is called `copying', comes down, the information's legal status becomes more and more important. A long time ago, I heard someone say that the issue was whether anyone could create a program using an interpreted language like Emacs Lisp, or whether the program would be too slow. That is not the issue now. Many programmers think of the trouble licenses cause to other programmers. That is to be expected, since programmers write code and document it. But the issue here is the interface between certain professionals in one industry and everyone else. Moreover, industry also develops hardware that combined with software have enabled copying to become less and less expensive. This means that when you show how the interface is supposed to work, you need to think about all the people who are not programmers and who do not know anything about computers or code. Nanotechnological assemblers -- rapidly reproducing Von Neumann machines that also copy other things -- would reduce the cost of manufacturing copies to zero. But we are never going to see a reduction to zero in the cost of attention getting, that is to say, of marketing and advertising. That is because getting attention is a zero-sum operation, like getting status. It is not like science-based manufacturing, which is positive sum. This means that an appropriate license will continue to be relevant. c) in particular: is it a good idea to split a free project into two parts with incompatible licences in a manner that makes it only possible for the copyright holder to sensibly maintain the exchange of material across the rift? Do we really want to demonstrate how to do such a thing in large scale? If people on one of the two projects insist on using a license that hurts people, especially the vast majority, who are non-programmers, then their project should suffer. So far, I have not seen any remarks that speak to the points. Among others, I would like to see an argument favoring a `Creative Commons' license that forbids any but gratis distribution, except for its controlling monopolist. Why would that be better for you and me and others? I think it is worse. I would like to see an argument that says that says that FSF need not be consistent; that it should become a `do not do what I do, do what I say' organization. I think the FSF should be consistent. Perhaps I am wrong. I would like to see, but do not expect to see, an argument that says that many programmers who work on GNU projects are really good at selling non-programing business patterns to people are not programmers and who know nothing about computers and software. 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, ... Why is it not possible? Are you suggesting that the XEmacs people lack proper papers for contributions? If so, this means they cannot ever ensure that the lawyers of a hostile organization with plenty of money will tell the organization's leaders that the software is legal. That is what I think you are suggesting. This means that the XEmacs project is rhetorically ineffective. Since I doubt that many people on it are concerned about business patterns, politics and the like, I do not think this issue is salient to them. I think they are mainly concerned with programming and wish the wider world would go away. In any event, the Lucid people were warned about this years ago and continued on their way. As for FSF: why should a project favoring software freedom, the GNU project, change its licenses to hurt its goal? I think that a good reason to go back on the license would be that FSF need not be consistent. But I do not believe that reason and have never heard an argument that claims that. 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. As for living in a bigger world: one could argue that laws and licenses are irrelevant since most of the world is `extra-legal'. Only regions like Western Europe and a few others are more or less `law abiding'. In much of the world, any organization with more than a billion US dollars or so per year to spend can corrupt enough officials for it to continue to do what it has done before. But again, I do not think that the rule of rich, greedy individuals is better than the rule of law. I have heard claims that rich, greedy individuals do make better rulers, and that their right to hinder me is good for others than me; but I have never welcomed that. Moreover, there are good arguments -- indeed I have made them -- that failure is an intrinsic problem of hierarchies that exclude change. (Failure may not occur in the short term, that is to say, in less than a couple of human generations.) Only when competitors are equally weak can such hierarchies last for thousands of years. So, to answer your questions again: a) the precise purpose of the GNU Free Documentation License is to offer a better alternative to greedy publishers, a better way to protect their investment in attention getting. The FSF puts its own documentation under the GFDL because its leaders believe that programmers, at least those involved in the GNU project, are poor at being `don't do what we do, do what we say' salesmen to people who are not programmers. b) the difference between a license that insists that commercial organizations fail in their purpose and a license that enables their purpose is vast. No one claims that companies that are unable recover costs will survive against companies that are able to revover costs. c) a project that hinders another in fulfilling its goal cannot expect to be supported by the second, except as charity. d) as an organization comes to realize that its primary business is politics in a deep sense -- that of changing business patterns -- and that the people in the organization are poor at politics with strangers who know nothing of computers and that competitors are out to destroy it, it makes more sense to offer licenses such as the GFDL as an alternative to licenses such as the `Creative Commons license with a commercial restriction'. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 19:43 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-12 19:59 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 20:46 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-12 21:00 ` Andy Piper 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 19:59 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: kfogel, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel "Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: > > To enable the FSF to be a `do what we do organization' rather than a > > `don't do what we do, do what we say' organization. > > a) what precise purpose does the GFDL achieve for the GNU Emacs manual > that is not achieved by it being under the GPL (your explanation is > mostly about the contrast to Public Domain and/or BSD)? > > To be a `do what we do, not a do what we say' organization. How does this hand-waving address the difference between GPL and GFDL? Anyway, if the GPL (probably when combined with special exceptions) does not deal satisfactorily with the problems arising in production of tangible goods such as boxes with embedded controllers and printed manuals, then it would be best if GPL version 3 would be written in a manner that would not necessitate placing Texinfo manuals and similar material tightly coupled to GPLed code under any incompatible licence. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 19:59 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 20:46 ` Robert J. Chassell 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-12 20:46 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: kfogel, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel > > To enable the FSF to be a `do what we do organization' rather than a > > `don't do what we do, do what we say' organization. > > a) what precise purpose does the GFDL achieve for the GNU Emacs manual > that is not achieved by it being under the GPL (your explanation is > mostly about the contrast to Public Domain and/or BSD)? > > To be a `do what we do, not a do what we say' organization. How does this hand-waving address the difference between GPL and GFDL? The GFDL is designed to enable commercial publishers who print on paper or other material entity to survive. The GPL is not. The idea is that software development will be paid for by hardware companies, by trade associations, by governments, by universities, and by programmers whose material income does come from the project at hand. In other words, cost recovery for someone writing code is, or should be, different than cost recovery for someone getting attention for and printing a book written by another. At the moment, proprietary software companies and many documentation publishers depend on the same method of cost recovery, which is to say monopoly pricing enforced (ultimately, not most of the time) by police. Proprietary restrictions hinder both software creation and documentation writing. That is why I have said so often that the purpose of the GFDL is to provide an alternative to a `Creative Commons license with a commercial restriction' or similar license. As for a single license: I personally would like to see one rather than two or many, but I am not sure that is possible. Laws are written mostly by lawyers. Businesses that use software are often run by people who know nothing about software (and the business may have nothing to do with software except to use it as a tool -- it may train horses or something like that). Perhaps one license is possible. Then again, perhaps not. Incidentally, a great advantages of both the GPL and the GFDL is that they can be read, perhaps with difficulty, by non-lawyers, and mean more or less the same thing to them as to lawyers. (I am told that the main legality a non-lawyer like me needs to learn is that `derivative works' are defined by judges, most of whom know nothing about software. The meaning of `derivative work' cannot be specified in a license.) Readability means that programmers who do not wish to learn much law can grok the major interfaces between them and the wider world. Imagine if a programmer could not understand these interfaces without becoming a different person -- imagine if a programmer were in the same position as a typical politician, the one being unable to understand the interface, the other being unable to understand the software. It is hard enough right now to deal with these issues: doubtless you have noticed that almost all discussion by programmers is addressed to programmers' issues rather than to non-programmers' issues. Imagine it were worse. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 19:43 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-12 19:59 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 21:00 ` Andy Piper 2004-12-13 1:59 ` Robert J. Chassell 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Andy Piper @ 2004-12-12 21:00 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: kfogel, emacs-devel, xemacs-beta At 11:43 AM 12/12/2004, Robert J. Chassell wrote: >Why is it not possible? Are you suggesting that the XEmacs people >lack proper papers for contributions? If so, this means they cannot >ever ensure that the lawyers of a hostile organization with plenty of >money will tell the organization's leaders that the software is legal. >That is what I think you are suggesting. That's either amusing or insulting. XEmacs explicitly does not collect papers because we believe that hinders development of the product. The only reason we have tried to collect papers is promote greater cooperation with the GNU Emacs project. >This means that the XEmacs project is rhetorically ineffective. Since >I doubt that many people on it are concerned about business patterns, >politics and the like, I do not think this issue is salient to them. >I think they are mainly concerned with programming and wish the wider >world would go away. Please do not make assumptions about we are or are not concerned with. If anything the XEmacs project is much more concerned with these things than the FSF appears to be. I personally believe that the FSF's approach has contributed to making Emacs (and XEmacs) largely irrelevant today. So you can protect the code from big, bad companies - I highly doubt that anyone in the real world actually cares anymore. andy ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 21:00 ` Andy Piper @ 2004-12-13 1:59 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-13 2:23 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-13 12:34 ` Thien-Thi Nguyen 0 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-13 1:59 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel At 11:43 AM 12/12/2004, Robert J. Chassell wrote: >Why is it not possible? Are you suggesting that the XEmacs people >lack proper papers for contributions? If so, this means they cannot >ever ensure that the lawyers of a hostile organization with plenty of >money will tell the organization's leaders that the software is legal. >That is what I think you are suggesting. That's either amusing or insulting. XEmacs explicitly does not collect papers because we believe that hinders development of the product. ... To me you sound as if your primary concern is in the `development of the product' rather than its use by strangers who care nothing about software. As a technique, you have made yourself hostage to anyone who is hostile to you and has lots of money. That is what is meant by `does not collect papers'. You can hope to be perceived as irrelevant, in which case no one will attack you. That is fine. But that also means you are doing no good for society as a whole. >This means that the XEmacs project is rhetorically ineffective. ... Please do not make assumptions about we are or are not concerned with. If anything the XEmacs project is much more concerned with these things than the FSF appears to be. Well, please undertake actions that show you being effective as salesmen. I am not persuaded of that. The FSF strategy is not very powerful, but I cannot think of anything more effective, considering the nature of the people who are part of GNU. Please show me how you have been better at affecting poltical and business change in Washington, Paris, and Berlin. I dislike this whole need for `papers', police support of legal monopolies, and developers' hinderances; I want to see this harm ended. I want to see more software freedom. ... So you can protect the code from big, bad companies - I highly doubt that anyone in the real world actually cares anymore. They do care. That is why some companies lobbied for laws like the DMCA. That is why SCO got funding which they have used, among other actions, to make statements that confused decision-makers who know nothing about software. Only the irrelevant are untouched. I personally believe that the FSF's approach has contributed to making Emacs (and XEmacs) largely irrelevant today. .... Perhaps GNU/Linux is irrelevant, but neither Microsoft nor IBM think so. I do not think so. As for Emacs, it may be a failed project; or it may be an integrated user environment that is less interesting than a graphic user interface; or it may be doing as well as a programmers' tool can be expected. In any case, Emacs is not the GNU project. 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. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 1:59 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-13 2:23 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-13 12:34 ` Thien-Thi Nguyen 1 sibling, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-13 2:23 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, Andy Piper, xemacs-beta "Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: > 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. Well, if we are talking about the licences of Emacs, then it is not an invalid view to be concerned with Emacs I'd say. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 1:59 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-13 2:23 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-13 12:34 ` Thien-Thi Nguyen 2004-12-13 16:53 ` Robert J. Chassell 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Thien-Thi Nguyen @ 2004-12-13 12:34 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, andy, xemacs-beta From: "Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 01:59:20 +0000 (UTC) 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, one of the many involved in this thread. to what extent any society has desire for self- and not-self-change is a concept too vague to be useful, primarily because what is externally visible may not be what is internally held (and if you are external enough, even understanding what is visible is very difficult). by not recognizing this, you also demonstrate the lack of salesmanship you have been talking about, which is at least consistent. thi ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 12:34 ` Thien-Thi Nguyen @ 2004-12-13 16:53 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-15 14:23 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-13 16:53 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, andy, xemacs-beta 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 16:53 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-15 14:23 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 2004-12-15 19:14 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-15 23:20 ` Richard Stallman 0 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Stephen J. Turnbull @ 2004-12-15 14:23 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, andy, emacs-devel >>>>> "Robert" == Robert J Chassell <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: Robert> To focus on Emacs when we are talking about licenses Robert> suggests to me that you are more concerned with the Robert> development of that product than with changing the Robert> political and business patterns of societies. Not exactly. Emacs is only part of my life, free software advocacy is only part of my life. In fact, living in a rather unfree (though very comfortable) society, software freedom is only a small part of the libertarian advocacy I should engage in. I prefer the simplicity of advocating the _quality_ of free software by producing it and giving it away, and of advocating the _extension_ of software freedom by _talking_ about it and engaging in other political behavior, separately from development. To me, the Emacs or XEmacs license is an instrument to enable sharing, no more, no less. It's not part of advocacy for me; I'm equally happy with whatever free upstream license, permissive or copyleft. It distresses me that licensing issues (and related legal flummery), however necessary, get in the way of sharing. You can mix advocacy with development if you like; I'm happy that you are free to do so. Nor do I speak for Andy, or need to. I don't know what he thinks he's doing, and it doesn't matter to me as long as we can share the code. Different people doing things different ways: that's freedom. That's good. Robert> An organization has at least three options, none vague: I am sorry, but although some of what you write about the business and socioeconomic environment in this passage is accurate, much is quite inadequate. Especially beware of false trichotomies, the CC-with- commercial-restriction does not fit any of the options as written. Robert> The goal of the GNU project is to change the wider Robert> society's default ground rules and default assumptions. Which is why using the label "free" for a license that permits self- serving restrictions was a strategic mistake IMHO. I really don't see a correspondingly large gain to offset the very real reputational damage, eg among Debian community members. It doesn't make any difference for XEmacs; the existing doc license will forever be incompatible with any strong copyleft but itself. But personally I wish the FSF would amend the GFDL to remove the additional encumbering restrictions, or simply rename it the GNU Documentation License: "The GDL is a not-too-unfree documentation license that reserves certain non-economic rights to authors, while perpetually protecting the freedoms it does provide for users. We use it ourselves to ensure that our advocacy of freedom always accompanies our documentation, while users will always be able to adapt the documentation to the needs of their derivatives of our free software." Still unfree, but very hard to get upset about when you put it that way. :-) "Do I contradict myself? Very well then; I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." -- W. Whitman, Song of Myself -- ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-15 14:23 ` Stephen J. Turnbull @ 2004-12-15 19:14 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-15 20:19 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-15 23:20 ` Richard Stallman 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-15 19:14 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, andy, xemacs-beta ... Emacs is only part of my life, free software advocacy is only part of my life. But your choice of licenses does not take up much time -- less time than Emacs. You need choose once and then the licenses do the work. If you go by the default of copyright, you promote monopoly restriction; if you go by the GPL, you promote freedom ... but you need not spend your time being an advocate who acts. I prefer the simplicity of advocating ... These sound like actions you do. To me, the Emacs or XEmacs license is an instrument to enable sharing, no more, no less. Right. So you if you favor that kind of freedom, you will choose a license that enables it. You will not need to act beyond making the choice (and filling out legal paper work, getting your employer or university to permit you to do so, as needed). It does not take much time. ... It distresses me that licensing issues (and related legal flummery), however necessary, get in the way of sharing. Well, we do not live in a world filled with people who always want to share. It would be much nicer if we did. Please complain to those who have caused these bad laws and please, if you feel like advocacy, try to change them. In any case, please do not help the bad guys passively, when you can help the good guys passively (except for a fairly short time when you choose licenses and/or handle legal paper work that is imposed on you by the bad guys). -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-15 19:14 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-15 20:19 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-15 23:32 ` Robert J. Chassell 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-15 20:19 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: Stephen J. Turnbull, xemacs-beta, andy, emacs-devel "Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: > In any case, please do not help the bad guys passively, when you can > help the good guys passively (except for a fairly short time when > you choose licenses and/or handle legal paper work that is imposed > on you by the bad guys). Well, but that's no reason to cheer the good guys when they are shooting themselves and their friends in the foot. Anyway, could we keep off the picturesque rhetoric? If there is nothing new to say about the topic, nothing is gained by repeating the already said things in an obfuscated way. I guess we more or less got our differing points of view presented. 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. 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. 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. 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. One proposal of mine was dual GFDL/GPL licencing which still has the disadvantage that third party code can be pulled into the manual by others only while sacrificing the GFDL licence, so we probably will still have the FSF as the primary responsible (non-public) source for GFDL manuals. It has the advantage that it can be accomplished rather fast, and the disadvantage that it does not seem to solve any of the more _urgent_ problems right now (certainly not the problem of the XEmacs developers, except that they might be less uncomfortable with the necessary relicensing then). 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. However, this will take quite long, and it does not appear to me that Richard thinks it feasible at all. Other choices are to let things stay as they are right now. All of those choices don't look very appealing. And there is little sense in dressing them up with rhetoric about how free software and its licences are either great or completely irrelevant. Whether they are great or irrelevant, we still have to pick them, and the cases have more or less been made. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-15 20:19 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-15 23:32 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-17 5:36 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-15 23:32 UTC (permalink / raw 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-15 23:32 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-17 5:36 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Stephen J. Turnbull @ 2004-12-17 5:36 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel >>>>> "Robert" == Robert J Chassell <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: Robert> It is not merely picturesque rhetoric, it is true: you do Robert> not have to spend all your time supporting freedom to be a Robert> fellow who helps others. In the case of software, you can Robert> do this by choosing a license. Excuse me? Richard just denied exactly that possibility to us, in <E1CctyU-0007l0-D7@fencepost.gnu.org>. In general, authors of derivatives of works licensed under strong copyleft have _no_ choice. I can choose not to distribute my work on XEmacs, but _the FSF_ chose XEmacs's licenses many years ago, leaving _me_ with _no_ choice[1] of license. That's what strong copyleft is all about, removing certain freedoms in order to protect certain other freedoms, deemed to be of overriding importance. IIRC, the FSF openly acknowledges this on the GNU web site among other places. It's a reasonable compromise, but it is compromise. XEmacs's documentation problem is simply "collateral damage" in the FSF's war against proprietary abuses. Richard says "too bad." It's a clear inconvenience for us, and he could have been more gracious, but he's exactly right. It is both undesirable and unavoidable. Robert> and suggested, although he did not say so, that choosing a Robert> good license, and dealing with legal paperwork, takes a Robert> great deal of time. You are correct that I did not say so. However, I did not suggest that choosing a license takes time. I suggested that dealing with a license chosen by someone else does. That's what this thread is about, at least for everyone who has posted except you. Robert> But that is not true. He framed the issue erroneously. Wrong. You are trying to switch discussion from the difficulties of dealing with someone else's license to the simplicity of choosing your own. That doesn't make my framing of _my_ issue erroneous. [...] Robert> which means that XEmacs depends on `security by Robert> obscurity'. This means that if XEmacs becomes widely No "if", at least not if GNU Emacs is the standard of "widely used." ;-) Robert> used, this policy may cause unanticipated trouble. Wrong again. I am satisfied with the XEmacs strategy as I understand it because I believe that there is no security, period. The SCO case proves that. SCO did not attack "code of dubious provenance"; they went after IBM's well-documented contribution. If the meanest patent shark in the ocean, IBM, doesn't know what "good papers" look like, who does? Therefore I do not worry about "unanticipated" technical trouble when the bad guys simply resort to brute force---lies, FUD and expensive lawyers---rather than anything resembling legal reasoning. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it." Similarly, our (implicit) strategy is to interpret copyright claims as damage, and to code around it. (We already have to do that, with the Emacs documentation. With friends like these ... well, I'll take such friends any day---and ask them to stop plinking BBs at my foot.) Risky strategy? Of course. The FSF's strategy is less risky, but not a sure thing. (For example, it is always vulnerable to attack via a completely independent patent on any technology it implements.) In return for risk reduction in the long run, it does, however, involve known and certain damage to the interests of some free software users and developers in the short run. A reasonable compromise---as is ours. Any ecologist will tell you that monoculture itself is risky. Vive la difference! Let Freedom ring![2] In the next paragraphs, A = practical difficulty of changing license of community-owned software B = incompatibility of GPL and GFDL dak> However, A is in some manner an outgrowth of problem B, dak> and if we got B solved in a satisfactory way, it might mean dak> that XEmacs developers (like everybody else) would need to dak> adapt at most _one_ more time. Robert> Maybe. But more likely more than one more time. Doesn't worry me. The big Problem A XEmacs faces with the FSF's old Emacs documentation license (aka the current XEmacs documentation license) is that it is unnamed and unversioned. Satisfactory resolution of B will involve a named versioned license so that a permission statement of the form "may be redistributed under the GNU Perfected License, version 1.0 or later, at your option" can be used. Robert> There is reason to separate the GFDL from the GPL. IMO, this is very short-sighted. Several hackers have pointed out the convergence between code and documentation as exemplified by uh, well, GNU Emacs itself. Don't forget "literate programming". The library association's brief in the Eldridge case points out the importance of cut and paste in compilations of existing documents. I have musician and film acquaintances who wish to have the same freedom to borrow the recordings of others that I have to borrow the code of GNU Emacs. I'm sure there are classes of information that you and I would intuitively agree are "not software" that I have not yet considered. I don't see why they shouldn't all benefit from the same definition of freedom as software. There simply is no reason not to use the GPL, perhaps in a slightly modified version to avoid referring to documentation as "the Program", etc, except for reasons of encouraging commerce.[3][4] Those reasons apply with equal force to software, yet in the case of software are rejected most vehemently by exactly the folks who insist that the GFDL is a free license. A rather unappealing combination. dak> All of those choices don't look very appealing. Robert> I agree. It is not an appealing world. And it is getting Robert> worse. It's always darkest before the dawn. When Milton Friedman and Kenneth Arrow can sign the same amicus brief for Eldridge, there is hope. Footnotes: [1] Yes, I have the option of delegating that choice to the FSF, and in fact I have done so. This eliminates the problem of incompatibility between GNU Emacs and XEmacs licenses for my own contributions, but still leaves me with _no choice of license_. [2] Sorry, David, but I do so love my own picturesque rhetoric. [3] Albeit on better terms than the "sorry for the legalese, but the net effect is that copying without explicit permission is forbidden" that graces O'Reilly's _X Window System_ series. [4] Of course there are clauses of the GFDL that deal with issues like "technical means to prevent copying". But it has long been recognized that the GPL needs to be amended to deal with those issues, and the GFDL's terms are arguably problematic. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-15 14:23 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 2004-12-15 19:14 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-15 23:20 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-16 10:58 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-17 1:32 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 1 sibling, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-15 23:20 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: bob, emacs-devel, andy, xemacs-beta But personally I wish the FSF would amend the GFDL to remove the additional encumbering restrictions, or simply rename it the GNU Documentation License: "The GDL is a not-too-unfree documentation license that reserves certain non-economic rights to authors, while perpetually In our judgment, it is free. If you disagree, you're entitled to your opinion. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-15 23:20 ` Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-16 10:58 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-16 12:18 ` Eli Zaretskii ` (2 more replies) 2004-12-17 1:32 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 1 sibling, 3 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-16 10:58 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: bob, Stephen J. Turnbull, xemacs-beta, andy, emacs-devel Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes: > But > personally I wish the FSF would amend the GFDL to remove the additional > encumbering restrictions, or simply rename it the GNU Documentation > License: > > "The GDL is a not-too-unfree documentation license that reserves > certain non-economic rights to authors, while perpetually > > In our judgment, it is free. If you disagree, you're entitled > to your opinion. If you want to produce a help sheet from the contents of the manual, having to include the complete invariant sections might prove prohibitive even where the scope and content of additional invariant sections has not been chosen explicitly for encumbering further distribution by a party in the middle. But of course, this has been trodded out with the Debian people already, and IIRC the GFDL does not meet their Debian Free Software Guideline, which was quite closely modeled after the FSF's idea of Software Freedom as expressed in various publications. But it leads nowhere to discuss the _name_ of the licence. The only thing that is interesting is how it is applied, and to what. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-16 10:58 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-16 12:18 ` Eli Zaretskii 2004-12-16 12:29 ` Kim F. Storm 2004-12-17 0:53 ` Richard Stallman 2 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Eli Zaretskii @ 2004-12-16 12:18 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy > From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> > Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 11:58:12 +0100 > Cc: bob@rattlesnake.com, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>, > xemacs-beta@xemacs.org, andy@xemacs.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org > > If you want to produce a help sheet from the contents of the manual, > having to include the complete invariant sections might prove > prohibitive I don't think this is a problem, since in that case, only small portions of the manual are copied. And Richard said at the beginning of this thread: I won't relicense such a large amount of material all together. If you show me specific parts you would like to use, I will consider relicensing them. So I think the problem exists only if very large parts of the manual are copied together. Richard actually said that in the past, at least in the context of copying material between doc strings and the manual (which theoretically raises similar issues, since the code is under the GPL). ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-16 10:58 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-16 12:18 ` Eli Zaretskii @ 2004-12-16 12:29 ` Kim F. Storm 2004-12-17 0:53 ` Richard Stallman 2 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Kim F. Storm @ 2004-12-16 12:29 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, Stephen J. Turnbull, andy David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes: > Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes: > >> But >> personally I wish the FSF would amend the GFDL to remove the additional >> encumbering restrictions, or simply rename it the GNU Documentation >> License: >> >> "The GDL is a not-too-unfree documentation license that reserves >> certain non-economic rights to authors, while perpetually >> >> In our judgment, it is free. If you disagree, you're entitled >> to your opinion. > > If you want to produce a help sheet from the contents of the manual, > having to include the complete invariant sections might prove > prohibitive even where the scope and content of additional invariant > sections has not been chosen explicitly for encumbering further > distribution by a party in the middle. I haven't studied the GFDL, but IIUC, the issue raised here with the GFDL is this: It is not legal (execpt for the copyright owner) to take sections from a GFDL'ed text and incorporating that text into a GPL program or other GPL or GFDL (or similarly) licensed documentation without breaking the GFDL of the original text. Compare this to taking a section of one GPL program and including it in another GPL program -- that's fully legal (IIUC). -- Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-16 10:58 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-16 12:18 ` Eli Zaretskii 2004-12-16 12:29 ` Kim F. Storm @ 2004-12-17 0:53 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-18 10:20 ` Ben Wing 2 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-17 0:53 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: bob, stephen, xemacs-beta, andy, emacs-devel The people who consider these issues for Debian have arrived at an extremely strict and mechanical way of interpreting their criteria, which I think is very mistaken. The FSF made this decision years ago, and it is not an open question now. Could you please move the discussion to gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org? ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* RE: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-17 0:53 ` Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-18 10:20 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-18 23:32 ` Miles Bader ` (3 more replies) 0 siblings, 4 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Ben Wing @ 2004-12-18 10:20 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: bob, stephen, emacs-devel, andy, xemacs-beta > The people who consider these issues for Debian have arrived > at an extremely strict and mechanical way of interpreting > their criteria, which I think is very mistaken. > > The FSF made this decision years ago, and it is not an open > question now. Could you please move the discussion to > gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org? This is COMPLETELY relevant to this list, because the bottom issue is [a] XEmacs forked and kept the identical license [b] 3 or 4 years ago -- i.e. 9-10 years after the XEmacs fork -- you changed the license in a way that it cross-incompatible. [c] I made a simple request -- will you cross-license the manual for us? [d] you said no. This is totally relevant to GNU Emacs. Richard, please reconsider. You have a reputation of antipathy towards XEmacs. If you're at all interested in mending fences a little, this would be a very easy step -- simply declare that we are allowed to use the code under our license (which was your license up through 2000 or so). Otherwise you give the impression of actively hindering the XEmacs project. ben ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-18 10:20 ` Ben Wing @ 2004-12-18 23:32 ` Miles Bader 2004-12-19 6:31 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-19 6:32 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-19 13:54 ` Robert J. Chassell ` (2 subsequent siblings) 3 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Miles Bader @ 2004-12-18 23:32 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy > Otherwise you give the impression of actively hindering the XEmacs project. Please, keep the tinfoil hats in the closet. This state of affairs is no doubt annoying to xemacs, but there'sno reason to believe that this was intentional. Richard is pretty consistent on this -- e.g., Debian, which is as good a friend as the FSF has, is also annoyed by this issue. Xemacs is certainly not without options, even if they want to use the FSF text and Richard doesn't budge; for instance: (1) Xemacs could use this opportunity to try to get its records in order and try to identify what parts of its manual are problematic etc. (2) Richard mentioned that the what he object to is blanket changes. Perhaps there could be a mechanism by which xemacs requests license flexibility for each bit of the manual text it wants to use; if the FSF gave timely responses to such request, it might be only a minor inconvenience. [I have no idea what exactly is acceptable to the FSF but ...] -Miles ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* RE: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-18 23:32 ` Miles Bader @ 2004-12-19 6:31 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-19 6:32 ` Ben Wing 1 sibling, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Ben Wing @ 2004-12-19 6:31 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy > (1) Xemacs could use this opportunity to try to get its > records in order > and try to identify what parts of its manual are > problematic etc. I thought it has abundantly been explained why this is not possible even if we wanted to do so -- we don't consider our records out of order. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* RE: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-18 23:32 ` Miles Bader 2004-12-19 6:31 ` Ben Wing @ 2004-12-19 6:32 ` Ben Wing 1 sibling, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Ben Wing @ 2004-12-19 6:32 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy > (2) Richard mentioned that the what he object to is blanket changes. > Perhaps there could be a mechanism by which xemacs > requests license > flexibility for each bit of the manual text it wants to > use; if the FSF > gave timely responses to such request, it might be only a minor > inconvenience. [I have no idea what exactly is > acceptable to the FSF > but ...] Richard, under what circumstances would you accept or refuse such a request? ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-18 10:20 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-18 23:32 ` Miles Bader @ 2004-12-19 13:54 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-19 15:40 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-20 10:56 ` Richard Stallman 3 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-19 13:54 UTC (permalink / raw This is COMPLETELY relevant to this list, because the bottom issue is [a] XEmacs ... However, on 12 Dec 2004, Andy Piper <andy@xemacs.org> said XEmacs explicitly does not collect papers .... This means that XEmacs depends on charity. In this case, it did not receive charity. Of course, people in the XEmacs project can complain, but they have decided to do nothing about their license. So that part of the issue is not relevant to this list. [c] ... will you cross-license the manual for us? That is only relevant if you may not legally change the modifiable parts, and if the illegality of your modifying those parts, such as an introduction, is less important than the principle the licensors are trying to establish in the world. Is it really true that legally you may not modify variant parts as you wish? As I said on 15 Dec 2004, I have been focusing on invariant issues, the `freedoms from', rather than on the `freedoms to'. But the freedom to modify is strong. Fair use is strong. As I said, I am not a lawyer; I am not skilled in these sorts of issues and I cannot tell you legally one way or the other. If my current understanding is correct, then you have no worries about modifications and about creating short `how-to' manuals or whatever from the Emacs manual. I do think it is a bug that the GFDL is not undertandable by lay people with only a little legal knowledge. The XEmacs issue is straightforward, but the modification and fair use issues are not. In particular, if I understand correctly, `fair use' is another feature, like `derivative work', that is established by judges, not licenses. As for the second issue: do you think the purpose of the GFDL is wrong, that is bad to permit invariant sections? Of the various types of invariant section, are you against an invariant section ... that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. Are you against limitations on front and back cover texts? Or think the limitations should be different? As "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> said correctly In general, authors of derivatives of works licensed under strong copyleft have _no_ choice. When it started, the XEmacs project chose to depend on a license chosen by someone else. You are trying to switch discussion from the difficulties of dealing with someone else's license to the simplicity of choosing your own. But you (meaning the members of the XEmacs project) did not write Emacs initially. I know for sure. You joined. And then you decided to stop being helpful in a major purpose of the GNU Emacs project -- I am not talking about writing of code or documentation, of course; that is a means, not an end. And you decided, presuming Andy Piper is right, to depend on charity. Unless your (now I am speaking individually again) framing takes this into account, it is erroneous. You say, for example I am satisfied with the XEmacs strategy as I understand it because I believe that there is no security, period. and speaking of SCO, say, If the meanest patent shark in the ocean, IBM, doesn't know what "good papers" look like, who does? as if IBM is more important to SCO either than courts or than investors on Wall Street who might be confused by a non-GPL'd license conflict in which one side makes statements irrelevant to the case. Note that the pay of SCO leaders depends on the value of SCO stock. Therefore I do not worry about "unanticipated" technical trouble when the bad guys simply resort to brute force---lies, FUD and expensive lawyers---rather than anything resembling legal reasoning. But `technical trouble' is one way for the bad guys to fight. It is as if you believe that courts which are honest are the only way to fight, not just a tool, like other tools. ... our (implicit) strategy is to interpret copyright claims as damage, and to code around it. With patents, this is not always possible. As you say, correctly, The FSF's strategy is less risky, but not a sure thing. I agree. It is not a sure thing. That is why the FSF seeks help. That is why it introduced the GFDL; it is better than a `Creative Commons license with a commercial restriction' or similar license. Several hackers have pointed out the convergence between code and documentation .... Yes. The problem is, those who use rivalrous or non-recoverable resources are more likely in practice to be publishers on CDs or paper than those who provide code. This may well not last too much longer -- it all depends on the progress of technology, law, and business models. But in the meantime, it is simply the case that software tends to end up on computers without using rivalrous or non-recoverable resources and documentation ends up both on computers and on CDs and paper. (This is not always the case, but is frequent.) Hence, the reason for a license that deals with rivalrous or non-recoverable resources. (Printed books and CDs are rivalrous resources. Like a shirt, if you have a book, I do not have it. You can loan me the book and the shirt, but then you have neither. Your and my use rival each other's. On the other hand, you can manufacture a copy of a program and give it to me so cheaply that it is, in effect, non-rivalrous.) A company that prints a book is in the hard-copy publishing business. That is to say, in business terms, it tries to recover resources from a decreasing marginal cost product that requires use of rivalrous resources. A software project is not like that. Of course, software projects may also deal with rivalrous and non-recoverable resources. Marketing can be an example; but it looks much less significant to software than to selling books. After all, intrinsically, software does not use rivalrous resources, but books do. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-18 10:20 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-18 23:32 ` Miles Bader 2004-12-19 13:54 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-19 15:40 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-19 16:10 ` Paul Pogonyshev 2004-12-20 10:56 ` Richard Stallman 3 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-19 15:40 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy "Ben Wing" <ben@666.com> writes: >> The people who consider these issues for Debian have arrived >> at an extremely strict and mechanical way of interpreting >> their criteria, which I think is very mistaken. >> >> The FSF made this decision years ago, and it is not an open >> question now. Could you please move the discussion to >> gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org? > > This is COMPLETELY relevant to this list, because the bottom issue is > > [a] XEmacs forked and kept the identical license > [b] 3 or 4 years ago -- i.e. 9-10 years after the XEmacs fork -- you changed > the license in a way that it cross-incompatible. > [c] I made a simple request -- will you cross-license the manual for us? > [d] you said no. > > This is totally relevant to GNU Emacs. Uh, no. It is relevant to XEmacs. Since you more or less stated that XEmacs developers are not to be bothered with issues like licences, it is somewhat unclear what factual problem you would have with changing the XEmacs manual licence to the GFDL. That you don't feel like it is not really sufficient. To the extent that your problems are related to actual practical considerations instead of "we liked the older licence better and did not bother asking contributors whether they'd go with changes, since they better be fine anyhow", they might also be relevant to Emacs. It is my personal opinion that by far the most prominent distribution channel for the Emacs manual is as part of Emacs, and so it should also be available under the GPL (which would probably not help your case, incidentally). I'd be somewhat less inclined to state the same thing for the Elisp tutorial: that is more like being a separate piece of software, not as tightly integrated as either the Elisp manual and the Emacs manual are with Emacs. > Richard, please reconsider. You have a reputation of antipathy > towards XEmacs. If you're at all interested in mending fences a > little, this would be a very easy step -- simply declare that we are > allowed to use the code under our license (which was your license up > through 2000 or so). Otherwise you give the impression of actively > hindering the XEmacs project. The question to solve for the licences of Emacs are what benefits Emacs first, and free software in general second. Licences like the GPL and the GFDL retain their force by having relevant software with suitable copyright owners willing to defend them. The FSF maintains a large and significant body of free software as the sole copyright holder, and it is paying a high price for it: the price is that the FSF itself is unable to reap the benefits of the GPL. It can't reincorporate third party contributions without explicit assignment. The GPL implies the freedom to fork. XEmacs developers have decided to make use of that freedom, and have by the same token decided that they would make use of that freedom also by relaxing their contribution criteria and maintaining diversified copyrights, partly not even tracking them. Which you were free to do. A different significant fork from FSF-maintained software was egcs. The egcs project, in contrast, decided that they would not simplify matters in a similar way: copyright assignments to the FSF were diligently maintained. As a result, this fork was able to get merged with the FSF's own variant of GCC again. Of course, egcs developers already had seen the consequences of the Emacs/XEmacs fork, so it was easier for them to decide differently. Now with regard to the discussion on this list, it has not made apparent by you a) why the GFDL is a bad choice for Emacs manuals (I myself have offered some opinions about that, but those mostly hold equally for the previous licence). b) why it would be technically impossible for you to change the XEmacs manual licence to the GFDL: it does not seem like you have handed out any written assurances that the licence is never going to change. My personal guess would be "we don't like the licence". Neither do I for this purpose and have explained why. But my dislike would be for the old version of the licence, too. It is pointless to say "well, everybody else but us should be affected by the GFDL, so please give us an exception". If there are arguments good enough for you, they should also be good enough for everybody else. So please explain in detail what concrete problems you would have with a licence change that other users and developers of free software could reasonably also be expected to have. As long as this is not particularly connected with Emacs itself, but rather a general dislike of the GFDL, I have to agree with Richard that this group does not seem the right place for it. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-19 15:40 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-19 16:10 ` Paul Pogonyshev 2004-12-19 21:32 ` David Kastrup 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Paul Pogonyshev @ 2004-12-19 16:10 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy David Kastrup wrote: > b) why it would be technically impossible for you to change the XEmacs > manual licence to the GFDL: it does not seem like you have handed out > any written assurances that the licence is never going to change. 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-19 16:10 ` Paul Pogonyshev @ 2004-12-19 21:32 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-19 23:48 ` Paul Pogonyshev 2004-12-20 0:19 ` Ben Wing 0 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-19 21:32 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy, Ben Wing Paul Pogonyshev <pogonyshev@gmx.net> writes: > David Kastrup wrote: >> b) why it would be technically impossible for you to change the XEmacs >> manual licence to the GFDL: it does not seem like you have handed out >> any written assurances that the licence is never going to change. > > I think because contributing a piece of work implicitly means that you > agree to distribute it under the _current_ license. Whose theory is that? I don't see any of it in copyright law, and I don't see any of it in the GPL. This sounds suspiciously like the "viral licence" theories where a contact with GPLed software magically makes all of your software free for the taking. This is simply not true. To have software GPLed, you need to explicitly licence it that way, regardless of whether it has come in contact with other GPLed software or not. Only if it has, you must not redistribute a combined product under a different licence. But there is no automatic remedy involved: you always have _several_ choices to come into compliance: licence the whole under GPL, or replace the GPLed parts by something different, or stop distributing it. > 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. To "relince" something it must have been licensed in the first place. > 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. Well, this "practical impossibility" is exactly what Emacs development has to put up with: collecting agreements from all contributors. > That said, I agree with you that this is mostly an XEmacs problem, > largely caused by their policy of not collecting copyright > assignments. It is not only collection of a copyright assignment (which makes relicensing possible). As far as I can see, their process does not involve even getting _any_ formal licence to use the work. As long as they are just relying on contributors playing nice with them in case of necessity (and GPL v2 is going to be replaced with GPL v3 at one time, too, and that will probably also mean that XEmacs has to follow suit at one time), they might as well see how the contributors will react to a licence change. > 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. Which is the FSF's choice. The difference is that XEmacs has decided not to bother about assignments and stuff, and due to that decision they don't have such a general cooperation to offer in a manner useful for Emacs. In contrast, the FSF still has the choice to licence the Emacs manual under different free licences because they bothered about the assignment, and they bother about licences. So the FSF, in contrast to XEmacs, has retained the technical possibility to "cooperate" (namely abandon the business of trying to choose a licence of their own and instead let the terms be determined by XEmacs' different processes), simply because they have been more careful. I have yet to see a good reason why this should be necessary (I don't think the "contributions are automagically licenced from the contributor to the potential redistributor without explicit agreement like the rest is" theory holds much legal merit) as well as desirable. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-19 21:32 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-19 23:48 ` Paul Pogonyshev 2004-12-20 8:07 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-20 14:05 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-20 0:19 ` Ben Wing 1 sibling, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Paul Pogonyshev @ 2004-12-19 23:48 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy David Kastrup wrote: > Paul Pogonyshev <pogonyshev@gmx.net> writes: > > David Kastrup wrote: > >> b) why it would be technically impossible for you to change the XEmacs > >> manual licence to the GFDL: it does not seem like you have handed out > >> any written assurances that the licence is never going to change. > > > > I think because contributing a piece of work implicitly means that you > > agree to distribute it under the _current_ license. > > Whose theory is that? I don't see any of it in copyright law, and I > don't see any of it in the GPL. Mine, I guess. Just to note, I'm not particularly familiar with all this stuff, so take it lightly, please. I'm just on that ``common sense'' ground. > This sounds suspiciously like the > "viral licence" theories where a contact with GPLed software magically > makes all of your software free for the taking. I fail to see much similarity, but feel free to elaborate. > This is simply not true. To have software GPLed, you need to > explicitly licence it that way, regardless of whether it has come in > contact with other GPLed software or not. Only if it has, you must > not redistribute a combined product under a different licence. But > there is no automatic remedy involved: you always have _several_ > choices to come into compliance: licence the whole under GPL, or > replace the GPLed parts by something different, or stop distributing > it. > > > 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. > > To "relince" something it must have been licensed in the first place. I cannot understand what exactly you think about contributions without signed papers. Let's try to filter it out (again, I'm basing on my common sense and little knowledge of copyright law, so, please, be kind to my mistakes.) So, let's assume John contributes a large patch (500 lines of code) to XEmacs. Since we are talking of XEmacs here, he is not asked for any copyright assignments or other legal papers. Now, what is the legal status of XEmacs + John's patch now? (We assume XEmacs is legally distributed under GNU GPL before the patch is added.) I'm listing all possibilities I can think of. Possibility 1. John's patch is automagically licensed under GNU GPL and ``license control'' is miraculously transferred to some mistical ``XEmacs spirit,'' that can change the license at whim, like FSF could if it wasn't bound by our assignment papers. This doesn't sound real. Possibility 2. John's patch is automagically licensed under GNU GPL, but to relicense it, you need his blessing. This is what I guessed in the previous message based on XEmacs as a whole being distributed under GNU GPL. However, you wrote that John's code couldn't be licensed implicitly: ``To have software GPLed, you need to explicitly licence it that way, regardless of whether it has come in contact with other GPLed software or not.'' What does ``explicitly'' means, BTW? I'm distributing a program I wrote, with each file saying it comes under GPL and the GPL text in `COPYING'. Is this explicit enough? Should John distribute his patch and GPL text along with it to make it explicit? Or is signing legal papers the only option? What is the difference between licensing done by the project original author and its contributors in terms of licensing? Possibility 3. John's patch is not licensed at all, because he didn't explictly license it. However, to the best of my knowledge of copyright law, you cannot even _use_ non-licensed work, not to mention modify or distribute it. This means that XEmacs people cannot legally merge John's patch in. In other words, XEmacs + John's patch combination is illegal to use, modify or distribute... Possibility 4. John loses the copyright on his contribution. That would solve the problem, but placing something in public domain is the decision of the author, so implicit lossage of copyright sounds way less realistic than implicit licensing. Besides, some of XEmacs files do carry other than FSF's copyrights. Possibility 5. XEmacs does require some sort of explicit licensing of contributions. Again, that would solve all problems, but from what I've heard here, this is simply not the case. So, to summarize, if my reasoning is correct, there are only two options left. Either XEmacs is distributed under GNU GPL, because each contributor implicitly (and some of them explicitly, by assigning copyright to FSF) licensed it under that license. Or XEmacs is used, distributed and modified illegally, because some parts of it are not licensed by copyright holders in any way. This means that people working on XEmacs, as well as distributors and even common users can be sued for copyright infringement (or how do they call it.) I personally don't feel easy about the second option. I'd like to be convinced that either the first or a third (missed here) option is true. Paul Pogonyshev ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-19 23:48 ` Paul Pogonyshev @ 2004-12-20 8:07 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-20 14:05 ` Robert J. Chassell 1 sibling, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-20 8:07 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy, Ben Wing Paul Pogonyshev <pogonyshev@gmx.net> writes: > David Kastrup wrote: >> Paul Pogonyshev <pogonyshev@gmx.net> writes: >> > David Kastrup wrote: >> >> b) why it would be technically impossible for you to change the XEmacs >> >> manual licence to the GFDL: it does not seem like you have handed out >> >> any written assurances that the licence is never going to change. >> > >> > I think because contributing a piece of work implicitly means that you >> > agree to distribute it under the _current_ license. >> >> Whose theory is that? I don't see any of it in copyright law, and I >> don't see any of it in the GPL. > > Mine, I guess. Just to note, I'm not particularly familiar with all > this stuff, so take it lightly, please. I'm just on that ``common > sense'' ground. > >> This sounds suspiciously like the >> "viral licence" theories where a contact with GPLed software magically >> makes all of your software free for the taking. > > I fail to see much similarity, but feel free to elaborate. It is the same "it comes into contact with GPL software, so it magically gets licenced as GPLed software" theory. >> This is simply not true. To have software GPLed, you need to >> explicitly licence it that way, regardless of whether it has come >> in contact with other GPLed software or not. Only if it has, you >> must not redistribute a combined product under a different licence. >> But there is no automatic remedy involved: you always have >> _several_ choices to come into compliance: licence the whole under >> GPL, or replace the GPLed parts by something different, or stop >> distributing it. >> >> > 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. >> >> To "reli[ce]nce" something it must have been licensed in the first >> place. > > I cannot understand what exactly you think about contributions > without signed papers. Let's try to filter it out (again, I'm > basing on my common sense and little knowledge of copyright law, so, > please, be kind to my mistakes.) > > So, let's assume John contributes a large patch (500 lines of code) > to XEmacs. Since we are talking of XEmacs here, he is not asked for > any copyright assignments or other legal papers. > > Now, what is the legal status of XEmacs + John's patch now? (We > assume XEmacs is legally distributed under GNU GPL before the patch > is added.) I'm listing all possibilities I can think of. > > Possibility 1. John's patch is automagically licensed under GNU GPL > and ``license control'' is miraculously transferred to some mistical > ``XEmacs spirit,'' that can change the license at whim, like FSF > could if it wasn't bound by our assignment papers. > > This doesn't sound real. > > Possibility 2. John's patch is automagically licensed under GNU > GPL, but to relicense it, you need his blessing. This is what I > guessed in the previous message based on XEmacs as a whole being > distributed under GNU GPL. > > However, you wrote that John's code couldn't be licensed implicitly: > ``To have software GPLed, you need to explicitly licence it that > way, regardless of whether it has come in contact with other GPLed > software or not.'' What does ``explicitly'' means, BTW? If you are not assigning copyright, then a written and signed statement is explicit enough for the law. > I'm distributing a program I wrote, with each file saying it comes > under GPL and the GPL text in `COPYING'. Is this explicit enough? The last time I looked, typical contributors were not distributing complete versions of XEmacs. Even if they were, if they change their mind afterwards about their contribution, all you can demand is then that they stop distributing XEmacs with their patch in it. > Should John distribute his patch and GPL text along with it to make > it explicit? The GPL text is a text. It's connection to the material must be established. It is not established by the files sitting in the same directory. If you have an exchange of consideration, like if you are paying somebody, _then_ the material is licenced to you and, absent any other written communication, it may be assumed that the accompanying licence file is considered valid if it has been attached by the selling party. But if you, say, pay somebody for working on XEmacs code and you don't put the GPL requirement in the contract, and you pay him for code (not for work hours), then you may run into legal trouble if he later claims he did not intend his work to be made available to third parties. > Or is signing legal papers the only option? What is the difference > between licensing done by the project original author and its > contributors in terms of licensing? Nothing. If the original author changes his mind, explains that the GPL licence file landed up in that directory by accident and he did not have permission from management, anyway, and stops handing out copies, and you have not given him anything in return, you can't drag him to court for damages. > Possibility 3. John's patch is not licensed at all, because he > didn't explictly license it. > > However, to the best of my knowledge of copyright law, you cannot > even _use_ non-licensed work, not to mention modify or distribute > it. This means that XEmacs people cannot legally merge John's patch > in. In other words, XEmacs + John's patch combination is illegal to > use, modify or distribute... There you are. If you need to go to court with a contributor that has changed its mind, this is what you will get stuck with. Lots of business gets done every day without anything written down (life would get complicated otherwise). But if somebody changes his mind afterwards, then the situation better be a standard situation that a court can resolve without making it a major case. > Possibility 5. XEmacs does require some sort of explicit licensing > of contributions. > > Again, that would solve all problems, but from what I've heard here, > this is simply not the case. It would solve the problem of legality. It would not solve the problem of having a single major copyright holder able to enforce copyright in case of licence breaches (which is why the FSF demands assignments instead of licences). > Either > > XEmacs is distributed under GNU GPL, because each contributor > implicitly (and some of them explicitly, by assigning > copyright to FSF) licensed it under that license. > > Or > > XEmacs is used, distributed and modified illegally, because > some parts of it are not licensed by copyright holders in any > way. This means that people working on XEmacs, as well as > distributors and even common users can be sued for copyright > infringement (or how do they call it.) Or XEmacs is used, distributed and modified under the assumption that all of the various copyright holders (which might not even be tracked) have given their consent to do so and will never withdraw it. Nobody can be sued for copyright infringement until it can be shown that this was done on purpose. Merely distributors and users can be ordered to stop using copies of XEmacs with the respective code in it. This will open the suitor for a counterclaim _if_ he can be shown to have distributed XEmacs himself. In addition, if some party distributed binary-only versions of XEmacs, and the XEmacs team would try to sue him, he can have the case thrown out of court if he can show that XEmacs itself uses code from him without explicit permission. > I personally don't feel easy about the second option. I'd like to be > convinced that either the first or a third (missed here) option is > true. When in doubt, ask a lawyer. The above is not legal advice, it is just one possible view. The more possible views exist, the more expensive court cases become, and the less predictable the outcome. The FSF is a small organization that does not have the resources to go to court with some company like SCO, and XEmacs is even smaller. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-19 23:48 ` Paul Pogonyshev 2004-12-20 8:07 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-20 14:05 ` Robert J. Chassell 1 sibling, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-20 14:05 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, xemacs-beta Paul Pogonyshev <pogonyshev@gmx.net> asks, I'm distributing a program I wrote, with each file saying it comes under GPL and the GPL text in `COPYING'. Is this explicit enough? No. I do not know whether you are connected to an employer or university who owns your work. You may not have the legal rights either to distribute or to claim a copyright on work done on your own time using only your own resources. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* RE: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-19 21:32 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-19 23:48 ` Paul Pogonyshev @ 2004-12-20 0:19 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-20 7:20 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-20 10:58 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 1 sibling, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Ben Wing @ 2004-12-20 0:19 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy > Which is the FSF's choice. The difference is that XEmacs has > decided not to bother about assignments and stuff, and due to > that decision they don't have such a general cooperation to > offer in a manner useful for Emacs. In contrast, the FSF > still has the choice to licence the Emacs manual under > different free licences because they bothered about the > assignment, and they bother about licences. You seem to think that it is the duty of XEmacs to do whatever is necessary to assure that GNU Emacs can use its code, even to the extent of hindering the development of XEmacs itself. In fact, if we had insisted on such a policy, we could not have gotten the sorts of corporate assistance (Sun, Amdahl, INS Engineering and others) that we got. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-20 0:19 ` Ben Wing @ 2004-12-20 7:20 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-20 10:58 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 1 sibling, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-20 7:20 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, 'Paul Pogonyshev', andy "Ben Wing" <ben@666.com> writes: >> Which is the FSF's choice. The difference is that XEmacs has >> decided not to bother about assignments and stuff, and due to >> that decision they don't have such a general cooperation to >> offer in a manner useful for Emacs. In contrast, the FSF >> still has the choice to licence the Emacs manual under >> different free licences because they bothered about the >> assignment, and they bother about licences. > > You seem to think that it is the duty of XEmacs to do whatever is > necessary to assure that GNU Emacs can use its code, even to the > extent of hindering the development of XEmacs itself. You seem to think that it is the duty of Emacs to do whatever is necessary to assure that XEmacs can use its manuals under XEmacs' own conditions, even to the extent of reverting the licence choices of Emacs itself. Neither is the other's duty. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-20 0:19 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-20 7:20 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-20 10:58 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 1 sibling, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Stephen J. Turnbull @ 2004-12-20 10:58 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: rms, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, 'Paul Pogonyshev', andy >>>>> "Ben" == Ben Wing <ben@666.com> writes: Ben> David Kastrup wrote: >> Which is the FSF's choice. The difference is that XEmacs has >> decided not to bother about assignments and stuff, and due to >> that decision they don't have such a general cooperation to >> offer in a manner useful for Emacs. That's sad but true, although I would phrase it differently. Ben> You seem to think that it is the duty of XEmacs to do Ben> whatever is necessary to assure that GNU Emacs can use its Not the duty; merely a precondition for any effort on the part of the FSF. Ben> code, even to the extent of hindering the development of Ben> XEmacs itself. In fact, if we had insisted on such a policy, Ben> we could not have gotten the sorts of corporate assistance Ben> (Sun, Amdahl, INS Engineering and others) that we got. Which, you should recall, the FSF has deliberately foregone, to the extent that accepting such assistance conflicts with the overriding goal of promoting software freedom---which you should not confuse with promoting free software. OK, Ben, you tried, you didn't get what you wanted, but when we decide we'd like to synch some parts of the manual, we can apply for the specific relicensing then, as Richard suggested. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-18 10:20 ` Ben Wing ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2004-12-19 15:40 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-20 10:56 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-20 12:47 ` David Kastrup 3 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-20 10:56 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: dak, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy Richard, please reconsider. You have a reputation of antipathy towards XEmacs. If you're at all interested in mending fences a little, this would be a very easy step -- simply declare that we are allowed to use the code under our license (which was your license up through 2000 or so). Otherwise you give the impression of actively hindering the XEmacs project. I did not choose this license with a view to its effects on you; it is the general FSF policy for manuals. However, the fact that it is inconvenient for XEmacs does not strike me as a disadvantage. After all, you have been uncooperative towards us for 10 years, and you don't see that as a disadvantage. We don't owe you anything, not even small favors. Despite my well-known and justified antipathy towards XEmacs, I offered to consider changing licenses on parts. However, the response was an ungreatful threat, so I now withdraw that offer. If I did even the slightest thing for XEmacs now, I might give the impression of being a pushover. I ask all Emacs developers not to respond any further to whatever they may say here about this. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-20 10:56 ` Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-20 12:47 ` David Kastrup 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-20 12:47 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, bob, stephen, andy Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes: > Richard, please reconsider. You have a reputation of antipathy > towards XEmacs. If you're at all interested in mending fences a > little, this would be a very easy step -- simply declare that we > are allowed to use the code under our license (which was your > license up through 2000 or so). Otherwise you give the > impression of actively hindering the XEmacs project. > > I did not choose this license with a view to its effects on you; it > is the general FSF policy for manuals. Definitely. > However, the fact that it is inconvenient for XEmacs does not strike > me as a disadvantage. It strikes me as a disadvantage, though not because of XEmacs in particular, but because it will be a disadvantage for _any_ derived project, and the whole point of a public licence like the GPL is not to put the copyright holder into a special position with regard to software development. > After all, you have been uncooperative towards us for 10 years, and > you don't see that as a disadvantage. You are speaking here for Ben Wing, presumably. But Ben Wing is not the only developer of XEmacs. I know pretty well, for example, that Stephen Turnbull, the current maintainer, considers the inability to broadly contribute back code with the stringency required by the Emacs project a disadvantage and has invested substantial amounts of work to remedy this in the past. But he as well as others are stuck with a history they can't change at their will. And that history is one of taking the "GPL" at its letter and spirit, developing in the manner that the "Public" in "General Public Licence" is suggesting, a manner that we as Emacs developers are not free to enjoy because our laws make it important that there remain substantial pieces of software which may be defended in court by a substantial copyright holder without conflict of interests from other contributors. > We don't owe you anything, not even small favors. Correct. We don't owe them anything. But the freedoms they enjoy are the freedoms we are fighting for in the first place. And where we find that our fight does not lead to the desired freedoms for the recipients of our software, we need to double-check. To meet our own goals, not those of the others. > Despite my well-known and justified antipathy towards XEmacs, I > offered to consider changing licenses on parts. However, the > response was an ungreatful threat, so I now withdraw that offer. If > I did even the slightest thing for XEmacs now, I might give the > impression of being a pushover. Let me put on the record here that I'd not consider you to be a pushover just because you are willing to judge requests for relicensing on their merit piece by piece, as you agreed to before, without letting yourself be swayed by some cheap rhetoric of Ben Wing. Even if Ben Wing was the only beneficiary of that process, we have the unfortunate situation that a free project with a free community is encountering problems with our choice of free licences in the intended manner. We need to look into this. Maybe after considering their case in detail we'll find that the situation is such that a licence change to GFDL is something that their processes should have made possible in the first place, and that there is nothing to be done on our side. But it would be a mistake not to look into this possible problem merely because the superficial beneficiary is XEmacs, and there are some XEmacs developers some of us don't like. It still is a case of downstream maintenance of free software, and if we don't care about the effects downstream from a copyright assigned pool, we might as well forget about public licensing altogether. In the long run, we should strive for a solution that does not necessitate any exceptions. But in the mean time, we should try to hold up the spirit of our free licences, if necessary, manually and learn about the problems with their application downstream. > I ask all Emacs developers not to respond any further to whatever > they may say here about this. I'd offer to go here as a go-between if necessary where individual more detailed requests are concerned. I agree with you that there does not seem to be a persuasive case for blanket permissions and agreements currently, and so I'll be happy to take this discussion into private. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-15 23:20 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-16 10:58 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-17 1:32 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 1 sibling, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Stephen J. Turnbull @ 2004-12-17 1:32 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: bob, Stephen J. Turnbull, emacs-devel, andy, xemacs-beta >>>>> "rms" == Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes: sjt> But personally I wish the FSF would amend the GFDL to sjt> remove the additional encumbering restrictions, or simply sjt> rename it the GNU Documentation License: sjt> "The GDL is a not-too-unfree documentation license sjt> that reserves certain non-economic rights to authors, while sjt> perpetually rms> In our judgment, it is free. If you disagree, you're rms> entitled to your opinion. That is exactly the point. I _am_ entitled to my opinion, as are the Debian Project, and the various BSD projects, and the OSI, as well as the general public. To the extent that the disagreement is widespread and deeply rooted, the FSF has a public relations problem. Now, I'm only one person, and my particular position is probably unusual, and definitely extreme. So maybe the public relations problem pointed out here is "small" compared to the benefits of insisting that the GFDL is "free". That's for you to judge; I simply wish to point out that the issue is not which definition of freedom is correct, but that treating the existence of differences as negligible harms us all. Extremism-in-the-defense-of-freedom-is-no-vice-ly y'rs, -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-11 10:27 ` Alan Mackenzie ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2004-12-12 2:03 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-12 4:39 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-12 6:16 ` Stefan Monnier 3 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-12 4:39 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, ben I do not understand why the GFDL exists at all. It seems to me that the GPL is as adequate for manuals as it is for code. The GPL was designed for software, not for books. The GPL's requirements would be quite inconvenient for anyone who wanted to publish a printed book from the material. I think the GFDL says more or less what it ought to say. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 4:39 ` Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-12 6:16 ` Stefan Monnier 2004-12-12 21:28 ` Eli Zaretskii 2004-12-13 19:51 ` Richard Stallman 0 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Stefan Monnier @ 2004-12-12 6:16 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: Alan Mackenzie, emacs-devel, xemacs-beta > I do not understand why the GFDL exists at all. It seems to me that the > GPL is as adequate for manuals as it is for code. > The GPL was designed for software, not for books. The GPL's > requirements would be quite inconvenient for anyone who wanted to > publish a printed book from the material. > I think the GFDL says more or less what it ought to say. OK, for books it makes sense. But it doesn't for material such as the elisp manual (which is not published). Stefan ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 6:16 ` Stefan Monnier @ 2004-12-12 21:28 ` Eli Zaretskii 2004-12-12 21:43 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-13 4:23 ` Dhruva 2004-12-13 19:51 ` Richard Stallman 1 sibling, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Eli Zaretskii @ 2004-12-12 21:28 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, ben > From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> > Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 01:16:59 -0500 > Cc: ben@666.com, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>, emacs-devel@gnu.org, > xemacs-beta@xemacs.org > > OK, for books it makes sense. But it doesn't for material such as the elisp > manual (which is not published). ??? The FSF sells printed copies of the ELisp manual. I actually saw them. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 21:28 ` Eli Zaretskii @ 2004-12-12 21:43 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-13 2:22 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-13 4:23 ` Dhruva 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-12 21:43 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: ben, emacs-devel, Stefan Monnier, xemacs-beta "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org> writes: >> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> >> Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 01:16:59 -0500 >> Cc: ben@666.com, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>, emacs-devel@gnu.org, >> xemacs-beta@xemacs.org >> >> OK, for books it makes sense. But it doesn't for material such as >> the elisp manual (which is not published). > > ??? The FSF sells printed copies of the ELisp manual. I actually saw > them. Well, but it would not seem that there is much interest from independent publishers, and that was supposed to be the driving factor for choosing the GFDL instead of the GPL, if I understood the argument correctly. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 21:43 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-13 2:22 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-13 6:48 ` Brian Palmer 2004-12-14 2:56 ` Karl Fogel 0 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-13 2:22 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel > ??? The FSF sells printed copies of the ELisp manual. I actually saw > them. Well, but it would not seem that there is much interest from independent publishers, and that was supposed to be the driving factor for choosing the GFDL instead of the GPL, if I understood the argument correctly. Evidentally, I have not been clear. Nothing in this thread that I said should have suggested that interest from independent publishers drives the use of the GFDL with regard to the elisp reference manual. Instead, I have tried to say that the goal is to persuade others to choose the GFDL over a `Creative Commons license with a commercial restriction' or similar license. The GFDL is better. Being a `do as we do' organization is necessary on account of the characters of the people in the organization. They are lousy at doing one thing and saying something at odds with that action. The GFDL ends up both moral and practical. These are the driving factors. (Incidentally, as far as I can see, the timescale for measuring success or failure is another generation or so. My hope is that by that time, societies will have decided that it is a good idea to permit strangers to modify changeable works like technical documentation, to permit strangers to manufacture copies of them that use resources, and at the same time to permit the initiating organizations to recover costs they have expended. My fear is that the strategy will have failed and that societies will have decided to restrict your freedom to protect yourself from those who would hinder development to their benefit.) -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 2:22 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-13 6:48 ` Brian Palmer 2004-12-13 10:05 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-14 2:56 ` Karl Fogel 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Brian Palmer @ 2004-12-13 6:48 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, xemacs-beta On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 02:22:14 +0000 (UTC), Robert J. Chassell <bob@rattlesnake.com> wrote: > Evidentally, I have not been clear. Nothing in this thread that I > said should have suggested that interest from independent publishers > drives the use of the GFDL with regard to the elisp reference manual. > > Instead, I have tried to say that the goal is to persuade others to > choose the GFDL over a `Creative Commons license with a commercial > restriction' or similar license. The GFDL is better. If using the GFDL on the emacs manual is as a persuasive example rather than to benefit the emacs project directly with the restrictions of the GFDL, why wouldn't licensing it both under the GPL and as GFDL serve the same purpose? That'd make it clear to organizations that the GFDL is not the same as GPL, plus allow emacs itself as a free project tightly coupled to the manual, to benefit. (To give credit, David Kastrup's point on the tight couplings between a GPLed project and the GFDLed project is spot on, I think). ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 6:48 ` Brian Palmer @ 2004-12-13 10:05 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-13 17:44 ` Bruce Stephens 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-13 10:05 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: bob, emacs-devel, xemacs-beta Brian Palmer <bpalmer@gmail.com> writes: > On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 02:22:14 +0000 (UTC), Robert J. Chassell > <bob@rattlesnake.com> wrote: >> Evidentally, I have not been clear. Nothing in this thread that I >> said should have suggested that interest from independent >> publishers drives the use of the GFDL with regard to the elisp >> reference manual. >> >> Instead, I have tried to say that the goal is to persuade others to >> choose the GFDL over a `Creative Commons license with a commercial >> restriction' or similar license. The GFDL is better. > > If using the GFDL on the emacs manual is as a persuasive example > rather than to benefit the emacs project directly with the > restrictions of the GFDL, why wouldn't licensing it both under the > GPL and as GFDL serve the same purpose? Because it still is impossible to move GPLed material into a manual that is supposed to be dual-licenced under the GPL and the GFDL, for anyone except the copyright holder on the GPLed software? It would solve some problems with Debian et al, in that their guidelines would then permit them to distribute Emacs including its manuals under the GPL: so those usages where the manual is not actually intended to go into print are covered. It would also mean that a publisher wanting to print the Emacs manual under the GFDL might have to get it from the FSF even though he might have a Debian CD flying around (if patches to the manual are done GPL-only). And it might cause derived versions of the Emacs manual around that are not publishable under the GFDL. Really, we need a version of the GPL that applies tolerably well to manuals... -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 10:05 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-13 17:44 ` Bruce Stephens 2004-12-14 13:09 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Bruce Stephens @ 2004-12-13 17:44 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes: [...] > Because it still is impossible to move GPLed material into a manual > that is supposed to be dual-licenced under the GPL and the GFDL, for > anyone except the copyright holder on the GPLed software? As far as I can tell the XEmacs people aren't asking for GNU GPL; the XEmacs manual is distributed under conditions which look incompatible with the GNU GPL. Indeed, I just compared the text in the current xemacs.texi with what's in emacs.texi version 1.10 (August 2000, just before the change described as "Update for GFDL. Not yet checked by rms."), and they look very nearly the same (the only difference is that in emacs.texi translations of the GNU Manifesto and similar sections have to be approved by "the Free Software Foundation", but xemacs.texi says "the author"). So presumably in 2000 the FSF chose to change the license, and the XEmacs people didn't follow, either because they didn't like the GFDL or because they felt they couldn't (changing licences is obviously easier if one entity owns the copyright). It seems a shame. Not as embarrassing as Debian moving all GFDL documentation to non-free (which hasn't happened yet, but seems not unlikely), but still disappointing, IMHO. <http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/*checkout*/emacs/emacs/man/emacs.texi?rev=1.10&content-type=text/plain> <http://cvs.xemacs.org/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/XEmacs/xemacs/man/xemacs/xemacs.texi?rev=1.16&content-type=text/plain> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 17:44 ` Bruce Stephens @ 2004-12-14 13:09 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Stephen J. Turnbull @ 2004-12-14 13:09 UTC (permalink / raw >>>>> "Bruce" == Bruce Stephens <bruce+usenet@cenderis.demon.co.uk> writes: Bruce> As far as I can tell the XEmacs people aren't asking for Bruce> GNU GPL; the XEmacs manual is distributed under conditions Bruce> which look incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is correct. We are not asking for the GPL. We are asking for the GNU Emacs (v19, I think) documentation license, which was, unfortunately for the current situation, anonymous and unversioned. I think of this license as approximately a special case of the GFDL. Because both require that any redistribution take place under terms _identical_ to the original, they are, however, mutually incompatible. Whatever the FSF might decide to do with its policy on documentation licenses, it shouldn't revert to a license that can only be specified by quoting the whole thing; it would be asking for this situation all over again. So no matter how you slice it, XEmacs would require an specific sublicense from the FSF to incorporate portions of GNU Emacs documents in the XEmacs documentation. Bruce> So presumably in 2000 the FSF chose to change the license, Bruce> and the XEmacs people didn't follow, either because they Bruce> didn't like the GFDL or because they felt they couldn't Bruce> (changing licences is obviously easier if one entity owns Bruce> the copyright). As far as I know, it didn't occur to us to change the license. There was no discussion that I can recall until perhaps two years later, which came to the obvious conclusion that changing the license was impractical, and the discussion was immediately dropped. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 2:22 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-13 6:48 ` Brian Palmer @ 2004-12-14 2:56 ` Karl Fogel 2004-12-14 14:16 ` Robert J. Chassell 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Karl Fogel @ 2004-12-14 2:56 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: David Kastrup, emacs-devel, xemacs-beta "Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: > Instead, I have tried to say that the goal is to persuade others to > choose the GFDL over a `Creative Commons license with a commercial > restriction' or similar license. The GFDL is better. There's been much contrasting of the GFDL w/ the GPL, or the GFDL with a "Creative Commons license with commercial restriction". I've never meant to suggest either of those, but rather licenses similar to the Creative Commons Plain Attribution or ShareAlike. (Note: I'm not advocating using an actual Creative Commons license, I'm just trying to shake us out of this rut in which the only alternatives to the GFDL are the GPL or some overly-restrictive Creative Commons license). This thread has been very active, so I apologize if my question below doesn't take into account something someone said. I tried to read all the posts, but might have missed a few. Anyway: For Emacs, what advantages does the GFDL have over (say) Creative Commons Plain Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike? Again, this is only about the application of the GFDL to Emacs, *not* about the GFDL in general. -Karl ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-14 2:56 ` Karl Fogel @ 2004-12-14 14:16 ` Robert J. Chassell 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-14 14:16 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel There's been much contrasting of the GFDL w/ the GPL, or the GFDL with a "Creative Commons license with commercial restriction". I've never meant to suggest either of those, but rather licenses similar to the Creative Commons Plain Attribution or ShareAlike. Yes, I understand. Unfortunately, you are not the one choosing the license to apply. I have seen items that ought to be free put under a "Creative Commons license with commercial restriction". We do not need to convince anyone who is already using a free license. They are not harming us or others. (Note: I'm not advocating using an actual Creative Commons license, I agree. Neither am I. Indeed, I think it was wrong to give free and non-free licenses the same initial name, that of `Creative Commons'. The language is confusing. Rhetoric becomes very important in persuading people who mostly are not listening, who do not care much, and who are not professionals in the subject matter, such as music creation or software. For Emacs, what advantages does the GFDL have over (say) Creative Commons Plain Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike? The two reasons I said before: first, that when FSF is dealing with the actual licenses of others, those two do not count. The license that counts is restricted. Please remember, neither you nor I are defining this issue. Second, as I said above, when dealing with strangers, language counts. Again, this is only about the application of the GFDL to Emacs, *not* about the GFDL in general. Right. This is what I am talking about: the application of the GFDL to Emacs. Note that my elisions are telling: I am not talking about the application of the GFDL to Emacs in a small community of like-minded programmers, as some thought the Emacs community was 20 years ago. Nor I am talking about the application of the GFDL to Emacs in a larger community that is harmless to Emacs. Unhappily, I am talking about the application of the GFDL to Emacs in the current world, its default circumstances. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 21:28 ` Eli Zaretskii 2004-12-12 21:43 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-13 4:23 ` Dhruva 1 sibling, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Dhruva @ 2004-12-13 4:23 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: ben, emacs-devel, Stefan Monnier, xemacs-beta On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 23:28:48 +0200, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote: > > From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> > > Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 01:16:59 -0500 > > Cc: ben@666.com, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>, emacs-devel@gnu.org, > > xemacs-beta@xemacs.org > > > > OK, for books it makes sense. But it doesn't for material such as the elisp > > manual (which is not published). > > ??? The FSF sells printed copies of the ELisp manual. I actually saw > them. ...and I have brought them (just to confirm), they come in 2 volumes. -dhruva -- Proud FSF member: #1935 http://schemer.fateback.com/ ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-12 6:16 ` Stefan Monnier 2004-12-12 21:28 ` Eli Zaretskii @ 2004-12-13 19:51 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-13 20:03 ` David Kastrup 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-13 19:51 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: acm, emacs-devel, xemacs-beta OK, for books it makes sense. But it doesn't for material such as the elisp manual (which is not published). We published it in the past, and I hope that we or others will publish it in the future. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 19:51 ` Richard Stallman @ 2004-12-13 20:03 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-14 10:03 ` Per Abrahamsen 2004-12-14 14:09 ` Robert J. Chassell 0 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-13 20:03 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: acm, xemacs-beta, emacs-devel, Stefan Monnier, ben Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes: > OK, for books it makes sense. But it doesn't for material such > as the elisp manual (which is not published). > > We published it in the past, and I hope that we or others will publish > it in the future. Is there some drawback that we'd have to encounter if things like the Elisp manual were dual-licenced GPL and GFDL? While I don't think that this would help the XEmacs people with their current predicament, it would at least guarantee that stuff like that does not get excluded from Debian distributions; and with the electronic forms of the manuals, the GPL appears more appropriate to me. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 20:03 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-14 10:03 ` Per Abrahamsen 2004-12-14 10:14 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-14 14:09 ` Robert J. Chassell 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Per Abrahamsen @ 2004-12-14 10:03 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes: > Is there some drawback that we'd have to encounter if things like the > Elisp manual were dual-licenced GPL and GFDL? I believe in general documentation for free software should be (dual) licensed with the same license as the software itself, it makes it much easier to move stuff between them. Like reusing good code comments and doc string in the manual, reusing parts of the manual as doc strings or comments, or even embedding sections from the manual in the code (like using a manual section as the basis for one of the "assistants" Lars talked about). ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-14 10:03 ` Per Abrahamsen @ 2004-12-14 10:14 ` David Kastrup 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-14 10:14 UTC (permalink / raw Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes: > David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes: > >> Is there some drawback that we'd have to encounter if things like >> the Elisp manual were dual-licenced GPL and GFDL? > > I believe in general documentation for free software should be > (dual) licensed with the same license as the software itself, it > makes it much easier to move stuff between them. Actually, you can't move from GPLed code into dual-licenced stuff without having to forego the second licence, unless you are the copyright holder. However, in the case of the Elisp manual, this would at least be an improvement for non-copyright holders as opposed to not being allowed to distribute the manual at all after moving GPLed code into it. > Like reusing good code comments and doc string in the manual, Which could be done only by the copyright holder unless one would give up the non-GPLed licence option. > reusing parts of the manual as doc strings or comments, Yes, that part would be important. > or even embedding sections from the manual in the code (like using a > manual section as the basis for one of the "assistants" Lars talked > about). This too. I mean, having the manual available as hyperlinked infopages actually _makes_ it pretty much an integral part of Emacs. And for this purpose, it really should have a GPL-compatible licence. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-13 20:03 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-14 10:03 ` Per Abrahamsen @ 2004-12-14 14:09 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-14 14:25 ` David Kastrup 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-14 14:09 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, xemacs-beta ... with the electronic forms of the manuals, the GPL appears more appropriate to me. What specifically of the current form of the GFDL, as it applies electronically, do you not like? For example, I do not like the language in the license that talks of publishing printed copies. This suggests that `publisher' means only `printed copy publisher'. I would prefer to see the term `publisher' be more general. However, I do not know whether the term is necessary for legal purposes. My sense is that commercial restrictions should apply to those who publish using `non-recoverable or rivalrous resources',like spending resources to get attention, using printed paper, or stamped CDs. But I am not sure my language is right, either. (Note that technological change may decrease the cost of vehicles -- something may replace printed paper or CDs -- but nothing can reduce the cost of attention getting.) -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-14 14:09 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-14 14:25 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-14 20:19 ` Robert J. Chassell 0 siblings, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-14 14:25 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, xemacs-beta "Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: > ... with the electronic forms of the manuals, the GPL appears more > appropriate to me. > > What specifically of the current form of the GFDL, as it applies > electronically, do you not like? I might be unable to bring across my point. My issue is not with the GFDL per se. My issue is that it is not GPL-compatible, yet we use it for something that forms an integrated and tightly coupled part of Emacs and evolves with it. And that defeats the "Public" in GPL since it requires the copyright holder for normal maintenance work of derived versions. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-14 14:25 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-14 20:19 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-14 22:09 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-15 8:03 ` Per Abrahamsen 0 siblings, 2 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-14 20:19 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel ... My issue is not with the GFDL per se. My issue is that it is not GPL-compatible, yet we use it for something that forms an integrated and tightly coupled part of Emacs and evolves with it. And that defeats the "Public" in GPL since it requires the copyright holder for normal maintenance work of derived versions. I do not understand you. First, the GFDL is not for code. Second, anyone can change the body of a GFDL's work. This means that you can modify code under the GNU GPL and then document your modification. And you may distribute the result, attempting to charge if you wish for both code and documentation. Or, of course, you may give away both. You have the freedom. The copyright holder is irrelevant. The only parts you may not legally change are parts that do not deal with the subject. This kind of invariance makes sense. The invariance means either that an author wrote something about the document, like why he wrote the first draft, or that an initial publisher used `non-recoverable or rivalrous resources'. The latter is the key new feature: it is designed to restrict other publishers free riding, but not to stop them from manufacturing and distributing copies of the work. Previously, invariant sections were an ad hoc part of documentation licenses. True, they usually were not aimed at encouraging a publisher (using non-recoverable or rivalrous resources) a little bit, but without legally excluding all other publishers as the "Creative Commons license with commercial restriction" does. That is the main new feature; and it could have been implemented in previous documentation licenses. Generally, people and organizations charge if they lose resources for each item distributed and do not treat the used resources as a `lost leader'. Thus, book publishers give away some books as lost leaders in order to gather attention and charge for the rest. But if they give away resources and never recover them, they will go broke if a book is successful. For the past half millenium, in Europe and in derived countries like the US, the method for recovering resources involved in books has been to prevent others from legally charging for copies that they produce. If necessary, police enforce this ban. The GFDL is different. It does not create a ban, but puts up a barrier (that is what the front and back cover text requirement is about). The goal is that the barrier be somewhat high, but not too high. In contrast, the "Creative Commons license with commercial restriction" and similar licenses put up a ban. Please explain further how GFDL actions defeat the "Public" in GPL, especially since invariant sections have existed in the licenses for past documentation. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-14 20:19 ` Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-14 22:09 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-15 0:12 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-15 8:03 ` Per Abrahamsen 1 sibling, 1 reply; 76+ messages in thread From: David Kastrup @ 2004-12-14 22:09 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta, emacs-devel "Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: > ... My issue is not with the GFDL per se. My issue is that it is > not GPL-compatible, yet we use it for something that forms an > integrated and tightly coupled part of Emacs and evolves with it. > > And that defeats the "Public" in GPL since it requires the copyright > holder for normal maintenance work of derived versions. > > I do not understand you. First, the GFDL is not for code. Second, > anyone can change the body of a GFDL's work. DOC strings and manual entries are material that are frequently copied between those differently licenced items. Customization entries link into the manual, and manual entries contain code snippets doing customization. Code examples in the manual make obvious candidates for copying into GPLed code for Emacs. And so on. > This means that you can modify code under the GNU GPL and then > document your modification. And you may distribute the result, > attempting to charge if you wish for both code and documentation. > Or, of course, you may give away both. You have the freedom. I am talking about working with existent code and manual entries. Of course, what you write yourself, you are free to licence as needed for the case in question. > The GFDL is different. It does not create a ban, but puts up a > barrier (that is what the front and back cover text requirement is > about). The goal is that the barrier be somewhat high, but not too > high. The barrier prohibits moving GPLed material into the manual unless you are the copyright holder, and moving material out of the manual into GPLed code. > Please explain further how GFDL actions defeat the "Public" in GPL, > especially since invariant sections have existed in the licenses for > past documentation. We already have established that the previous licence for the Emacs Lisp manual had the same basic problems. I am not talking about returning to the old licence now (even though this would save the XEmacs developers headaches), but whether it is a good idea to licence Emacs with the integral Texinfo manuals under two incompatible licences. This has been the case even before we switched to the GFDL as far as I can see. But that does not mean that it was a good idea at this time, and in the mean time, the Emacs Lisp manual has become quite closer integrated with Emacs. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-14 22:09 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-15 0:12 ` Robert J. Chassell 0 siblings, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Robert J. Chassell @ 2004-12-15 0:12 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: emacs-devel, xemacs-beta DOC strings and manual entries are material that are frequently copied between those differently licenced items. Now I see what you are saying. The legal question is, when you are basing additions to a Texinfo manual on a large number of doc strings from functions, are the changes you are likely to make big enough so that the manual does not become a derivative work? (Presumably, fair use means the issue is not relevant to a small number of doc strings. And the issue not relevant to additions that are quite different.) I don't know the legal answer. Presuming that neither RMS nor anyone else has thought of this, it becomes necessary to ask some people who understand the laws in all the major countries of concern. That is a major undertaking. My hunch is that a legally valid expectation is that any one's write up will be sufficiently different, simply because he or she is trying to write a document, not a doc string. Put another way, only poorly written documentation would be illegal.... But maybe not. As for ... code snippets ... [which include doc strings] at the end of the node, (emacs)GNU Free Documentation License says If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit their use in free software. which handles this issue unless you are moving others' code into a Texinfo manual without rewriting it more appropriately for a manual. If my hunch is right, that would be no problem since it would be reasonable to expect you to rewrite it suitably. Otherwise, as far as I can see, you have a reasonable point. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
* Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual 2004-12-14 20:19 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-14 22:09 ` David Kastrup @ 2004-12-15 8:03 ` Per Abrahamsen 1 sibling, 0 replies; 76+ messages in thread From: Per Abrahamsen @ 2004-12-15 8:03 UTC (permalink / raw Cc: xemacs-beta "Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes: > I do not understand you. First, the GFDL is not for code. Second, > anyone can change the body of a GFDL's work. With concepts such as "self-documenting editors", "litterate programming" and "embedded documentation", the line between documentation and code becomes blurry. At least one of those concepts should apply to Emacs :) Which to me indicate that code and documentation for free software ought to be covered by the same license. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 76+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2004-12-20 14:05 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 76+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2004-12-09 22:28 Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual Ben Wing 2004-12-10 23:14 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-11 0:59 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-11 1:06 ` Miles Bader 2004-12-11 10:27 ` Alan Mackenzie 2004-12-11 18:19 ` Eli Zaretskii 2004-12-11 20:43 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-11 19:02 ` Stefan Monnier 2004-12-12 0:26 ` Karl Fogel 2004-12-12 8:57 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 16:56 ` Brian Palmer 2004-12-12 13:31 ` Matthew Mundell 2004-12-12 13:40 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 2:03 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-12 4:59 ` Karl Fogel [not found] ` <m1CdWGG-0004R2C@rattlesnake.com> 2004-12-12 17:43 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 18:39 ` Florian Weimer 2004-12-12 19:24 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 19:49 ` Florian Weimer 2004-12-12 19:43 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-12 19:59 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-12 20:46 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-12 21:00 ` Andy Piper 2004-12-13 1:59 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-13 2:23 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-13 12:34 ` Thien-Thi Nguyen 2004-12-13 16:53 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-15 14:23 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 2004-12-15 19:14 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-15 20:19 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-15 23:32 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-17 5:36 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 2004-12-15 23:20 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-16 10:58 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-16 12:18 ` Eli Zaretskii 2004-12-16 12:29 ` Kim F. Storm 2004-12-17 0:53 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-18 10:20 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-18 23:32 ` Miles Bader 2004-12-19 6:31 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-19 6:32 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-19 13:54 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-19 15:40 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-19 16:10 ` Paul Pogonyshev 2004-12-19 21:32 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-19 23:48 ` Paul Pogonyshev 2004-12-20 8:07 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-20 14:05 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-20 0:19 ` Ben Wing 2004-12-20 7:20 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-20 10:58 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 2004-12-20 10:56 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-20 12:47 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-17 1:32 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 2004-12-12 4:39 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-12 6:16 ` Stefan Monnier 2004-12-12 21:28 ` Eli Zaretskii 2004-12-12 21:43 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-13 2:22 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-13 6:48 ` Brian Palmer 2004-12-13 10:05 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-13 17:44 ` Bruce Stephens 2004-12-14 13:09 ` Stephen J. Turnbull 2004-12-14 2:56 ` Karl Fogel 2004-12-14 14:16 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-13 4:23 ` Dhruva 2004-12-13 19:51 ` Richard Stallman 2004-12-13 20:03 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-14 10:03 ` Per Abrahamsen 2004-12-14 10:14 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-14 14:09 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-14 14:25 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-14 20:19 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-14 22:09 ` David Kastrup 2004-12-15 0:12 ` Robert J. Chassell 2004-12-15 8:03 ` Per Abrahamsen
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