Principals

Posted Mar 4, 2005 19:35 UTC (Fri) by Ross (guest, #4065)
In reply to: GFDL does not... by komarek
Parent article: A day in the life of emacs

I'm fine with someone sticking to their principals above convenience. In
fact, that's one of the best attributes of RMS.

But I don't see how _not_ "sharing the software" is really part of his
principals. The GFDL is obviously not Free the same as the GPL. RMS has
said this is because documentation is different than software and the rights
which empower software users are not the same for documentation. I have
never found that to be a convincing argument.

And to the best of my knowledge XEmacs is under the GPL just like Emacs.
The reason that GNU won't take patches from it is because they want copyright
assignments which is of course their perogative but it is unfair to act as
if XEmacs is withholding improvements from others.

Principals

Posted Mar 4, 2005 20:13 UTC (Fri) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link]

I see that you are right about the GPL, and I agree then that the problem is probably copyright assignment. Now that it's not so late at night, I've taken the time to read http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html, and this verifies the copyright assignment problem.

Back to the original reason I posted, sp_ware's comment that RMS wants to be a dictator still seems wrong and ignorant. That he set up the FSF and GNU projects, and gave up his copyrights to the FSF, suggests strongly that he does not want to be a dictator. Any disdain he shows for competing Free software could easily come from disliking the waste of effort of duplication (that xemacs link above quotes him on this, w/r/t XEmacs).

Thank-you for pointing out my mistake.

-Paul Komarek