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

[Stefan Monnier]

> 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