License of the Emacs website (was: Re: First draft of the Emacs website)

[Chad Brown]

Subject changed.

> On 03 Dec 2015, at 19:57, Random832 <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On 2015-12-02, Xue Fuqiao <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 12:36 AM, Random832 <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> - "Verbatim" copying permission statement is non-free.
>> 
>> The standard copyright terms for GNU web pages is now the Creative
>> Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
> 
> That's also non-free. Why not the GFDL, or CC-BY-SA?
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html specifically recommends
> against this license. It's not clear why website text (or layout, etc)
> is so different from documentation as to require different principles.

That’s interesting, because
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.en.html says:

    The standard copyright terms for GNU web pages is now the Creative
    Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

The web page you site also includes this:

    Works that express someone's opinion—memoirs, editorials, and
    so on—serve a fundamentally different purpose than works for
    practical use like software and documentation. Because of
    this, we expect them to provide recipients with a different
    set of permissions: just the permission to copy and
    distribute the work verbatim. Richard Stallman discusses this
    frequently in his speeches.

    Because so many licenses meet these criteria, we cannot list them all.
    If you are looking for one to use yourself, however, there are two
    that we recommend:

    * GNU Verbatim Copying License (#GNUVerbatim) This was the license used
      throughout the GNU web site for many years. It is very simple, and
      especially well-suited to written works.

    * Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 license (a.k.a. CC BY-ND)
      (#ccbynd) This is the license used throughout the GNU and FSF web
      sites. This license provides much the same permissions as our verbatim
      copying license, but it's much more detailed. We particularly
      recommend it for audio and/or video works of opinion. Please be
      specific about which Creative Commons license is being used.

This seems like a discussion for someplace other than the emacs-devel
list, so I tried (perhaps crudely?) to redirect it to emacs-tangents.

Thanks,
~Chad