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

[Kim F. Storm]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> Richard Stallman <address@hidden> 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 <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk