Re: Some ideas with Emacs

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2019-12-01, at 11:56, Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 2019-12-01, at 06:57, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
>> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
>> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>>
>> The Intro to Emacs Lisp needs updating.  Emacs Lisp has changed since
>> the late Bob Chassell worked on it.
>>
>> Would you like to update it?  That would be far easier than writing a
>> new manual from zero, and would be good practice for that.
>
> Easier - probably yes.  But Bob Chassell's book is distributed under
> GFDL, which may be a good choice for documentation, but is an extremely
> bad choice for a book.  Contributing to a GFDL book is pointless IMO.
> (I might release my book on some CC license one day, but then it would
> have to be an ND variant.)

Correction: I read a bit more about GFDL, and I withdraw my opinion that
it is an "extremely bad choice" for a book: I think now that it is not
"extremely bad", but just "bad" or "very bad".  Reason: GFDL has the
"invariant sections" clause.  I guess the author probably could
technically call the whole book an "invariant section" - but then there
is no point to use GFDL anyway, no?

To be more positive, a reasonable license for "free" (as in FSF) book
would allow no modifications except for e.g. footnotes clearly marked as
not written by the original author.  AFAIK, GFDL's "History" section is
way worse than that (since it is a lot more inconvenient for the
reader).

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl