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

[Robert J. Chassell]

    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                         
    address@hidden                         GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  http://www.teak.cc