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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 10:27:39 +0000 (GMT)
> From: Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> 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 think you are taking the ``free'' part too literally.  Free Software
or Free Documentation does not necessarily mean that you are ``free''
to do whatever you want with it.  For example, the GPL says that your
freedom is limited by the requirement to supply the sources together
with the binary.

So an argument that ``free'' means there are no limitations is an
invalid argument, IMHO.  A better argument would be whether the
limitations of freedom imposed by the GFDL are justified by the goals
of the Free Software movement.