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

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     Richard, please reconsider.  You have a reputation of antipathy
>     towards XEmacs.  If you're at all interested in mending fences a
>     little, this would be a very easy step -- simply declare that we
>     are allowed to use the code under our license (which was your
>     license up through 2000 or so).  Otherwise you give the
>     impression of actively hindering the XEmacs project.
>
> I did not choose this license with a view to its effects on you; it
> is the general FSF policy for manuals.

Definitely.

> However, the fact that it is inconvenient for XEmacs does not strike
> me as a disadvantage.

It strikes me as a disadvantage, though not because of XEmacs in
particular, but because it will be a disadvantage for _any_ derived
project, and the whole point of a public licence like the GPL is not
to put the copyright holder into a special position with regard to
software development.

> After all, you have been uncooperative towards us for 10 years, and
> you don't see that as a disadvantage.

You are speaking here for Ben Wing, presumably.  But Ben Wing is not
the only developer of XEmacs.  I know pretty well, for example, that
Stephen Turnbull, the current maintainer, considers the inability to
broadly contribute back code with the stringency required by the Emacs
project a disadvantage and has invested substantial amounts of work to
remedy this in the past.  But he as well as others are stuck with a
history they can't change at their will.

And that history is one of taking the "GPL" at its letter and spirit,
developing in the manner that the "Public" in "General Public Licence"
is suggesting, a manner that we as Emacs developers are not free to
enjoy because our laws make it important that there remain substantial
pieces of software which may be defended in court by a substantial
copyright holder without conflict of interests from other
contributors.

> We don't owe you anything, not even small favors.

Correct.  We don't owe them anything.  But the freedoms they enjoy are
the freedoms we are fighting for in the first place.

And where we find that our fight does not lead to the desired freedoms
for the recipients of our software, we need to double-check.  To meet
our own goals, not those of the others.

> Despite my well-known and justified antipathy towards XEmacs, I
> offered to consider changing licenses on parts.  However, the
> response was an ungreatful threat, so I now withdraw that offer.  If
> I did even the slightest thing for XEmacs now, I might give the
> impression of being a pushover.

Let me put on the record here that I'd not consider you to be a
pushover just because you are willing to judge requests for
relicensing on their merit piece by piece, as you agreed to before,
without letting yourself be swayed by some cheap rhetoric of Ben
Wing.  Even if Ben Wing was the only beneficiary of that process, we
have the unfortunate situation that a free project with a free
community is encountering problems with our choice of free licences in
the intended manner.

We need to look into this.  Maybe after considering their case in
detail we'll find that the situation is such that a licence change to
GFDL is something that their processes should have made possible in
the first place, and that there is nothing to be done on our side.

But it would be a mistake not to look into this possible problem
merely because the superficial beneficiary is XEmacs, and there are
some XEmacs developers some of us don't like.  It still is a case of
downstream maintenance of free software, and if we don't care about
the effects downstream from a copyright assigned pool, we might as
well forget about public licensing altogether.  In the long run, we
should strive for a solution that does not necessitate any exceptions.
But in the mean time, we should try to hold up the spirit of our free
licences, if necessary, manually and learn about the problems with
their application downstream.

> I ask all Emacs developers not to respond any further to whatever
> they may say here about this.

I'd offer to go here as a go-between if necessary where individual
more detailed requests are concerned.

I agree with you that there does not seem to be a persuasive case for
blanket permissions and agreements currently, and so I'll be happy to
take this discussion into private.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum