Frank Küster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > "Davide G. M. Salvetti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> yes, I knew from the developers' list. I will be able to work on >> it next week. We're going to have a problem, though, the same old >> problem of the new DFSG interpretation WRT the GNU FDL. David will >> release the manual for 11.54 under the GNU FDL > > That will mean that I will no longer contribute to AUCTeX > documentation. Bad enough that I have signed the paperwork and > cannot prevent my old texts from being incorporated in a document > under a misdrafted license.
Well, it is not like this should come as a major surprise, since AUCTeX has become a GNU project. I don't particularly like the license in its current state, but it is slated for change, anyway, and it has been accepted by a Debian vote as being GFDL-compliant when used without invariant sections. >> and he will probably have to add front and back covers (as per GNU >> Maintainer Guidelines), though no invariant sections. > > Front and back covers are invariant; The consist of "A GNU Manual" and "You have freedom to copy and modify this GNU Manual, like GNU software.", respectively, to be used on mass printings. Not really a terrible threat to freedom in my book, but Debian has its own agendas. > however that doesn't matter for my decision. Of course, you are free to ignore the vote done by Debian developers in your decision of what you want to work on. I try balancing my duties as a GNU maintainer with the real world including Debian developers, and reactions like that make me wonder why I bother at all. >> At this moment David is talking to RMS to try and have an exception >> (i.e., pure GNU FDL without front and back cover, no invariant >> sections). > > I was under the impression that if a manual was under GPL, it could > stay, and need not be relicensed. The manual never was under the GPL. I recommend you need the previous license notes. > Anybody on the auctex developers' list feeling like forking from the > last GPL'ed manual? There is no such thing as a "last GPL'ed manual". Naturally, such a fork would not get distributed with the main distribution of AUCTeX. One of the points of turning AUCTeX into a GNU project was to make use of the infrastructure of the FSF, and to make it possible at one point of time to include AUCTeX into Emacs proper. AUCTeX is not useful without Emacs, so it is not like there is much sense into trying to make AUCTeX closer to Debian than Emacs is (of course, some people might use AUCTeX with XEmacs, too, but that is a project and combination that does not seem to have better prospects to me than AUCTeX/Emacs). People assigning copyright to the Free Software Foundation are, of course, free to provide their work under different licenses to other people, according to the assignment contract. So you could try asking all the people involved. Since the point of turning AUCTeX into a GNU project was to unify forces, not divide them, I would not be inclined to do this for my part of the work. Where I am dissatisfied with the GFDL, I prefer working this out with the FSF on the next version of the GFDL, and possibly the maintainer guidelines and their interpretation. Yes, being a GNU project also means having to follow some guidelines. AUCTeX and its development and the infrastructure were slumping when I decided to submit it for a GNU project, with support of all the previous maintainers. I considered the price the developers pay by following the guidelines a reasonable return for the support of the FSF which, by the way, includes the mailing lists. A fork would have to set up its own lists. If you feel different about this, feel free to start a fork: that is what free software is about. I doubt you will have more success than AUCTeX had before it became a GNU project, and there was no "coompetition" at that time. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum _______________________________________________ auctex-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/auctex-devel
