Free software needs free documentation

Free software needs free documentation

Posted Mar 13, 2005 15:27 UTC (Sun) by anton (guest, #25547)
In reply to: Free software needs free documentation by forthy
Parent article: A day in the life of emacs

>Therefore, following the rule that free software needs free
>documentation, the documentation must allow forking the same way as
>the code.

The GFDL does. That's not the problem (as far as I understand it).
The problem is that the Xemacs manual is under the GPL and thus cannot
incorporate GFDL stuff. If the Xemacs people had assigned their
changes to a governing body (e.g., the FSF:-), changing the license to
a GFDL-compatible one would be easy, but since they have not, they
have to run after all their contributors, or instead get the FSF to
change the license of the text they want to incorporate; since the
latter approach has failed, they have to follow the former, or just
give up on using GNU Emacs text in the Xemacs manual.

Linux will probably have a similar problem with GPLv2-only vs. GPLv3
licensing.

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