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

[Robert J. Chassell]

      To focus on Emacs when we are talking about licenses suggests to me
      that you are more concerned with the development of that product than
      with changing the political and business patterns of societies.

   you are falling victim to a false dichotomy.  the xemacs programmers are
   certainly a society, ...

My apologies.  I thought I was being clear:  the society to which I am
referring is the larger society, at the very least that of Europe and
North America.

Yes, the xemacs programmers are certainly a society, but that is not
the one about which I am talking.

As I said earlier, Sun, 12 Dec 2004 16:07:52 +0000 (UTC)

    ... the entire purpose of a legal license is to provide an
    interface between those who know something about the subject and
    the vastly larger outside world.

The xemacs society is certainly not the `vastly larger outside world'.
I went on to say,   Sun, 12 Dec 2004 19:43:59 +0000 (UTC)

    ...  the issue here is the interface between certain professionals
    in one industry and everyone else. ... people who are not
    programmers and who do not know anything about computers or code.

    ....

    Certainly, licenses are irrelevant to people who live in small
    communities.  In a small community, social pressure and personal
    knowledge works well.  25 years ago, Unix and Lisp programmers lived
    in such a community or many of them did.  I think many programmers
    wish they still lived in such a community.

    But the wider world has intervened.  Programming and its machines have
    become successful.  Even my grand-neice uses a computer.  We do not
    live in a small and isolated community any more.

That larger society is the one to which I am referring, not to the
society of xemacs programmers, all of whom know about computers and
code.

   ... a concept too vague to be useful ...

But we are talking about business models and their supporting laws.
These are NOT vague.

An organization has at least three options, none vague:

 1. Should the organization generate revenue by lowering its output
    and raising its price, and ensuring it can do that through law?
    That is what a `Creative Commons license with a commercial
    restriction' or one similar encourages.

 2. Or should the organization generate revenue by increasing its
    output and selling more ... and also permit others to free ride on
    its unrecoverable costs, like attention getting, so it never
    undertakes the action in the first place?  That is what the GNU
    GPL encourages for documentation.

 3. Or, considering the GFDL, should the organization generate revenue
    by increasing its output and selling more ...  and also permit
    competition, but with what I hope is the `right amount' of
    restriction -- enough so the initiating organization can recover
    costs so it will undertake actions but not so much that the
    initiating organization can legally prevent any income-related
    competition as it can with a `Creative Commons license with a
    commercial restriction'.

It is worth saying again:  a license on information is an interface
between certain professionals in one industry and everyone else.  

The professionals may be software documentation writers or musicians
or others.  An intermediate organization may gather attention for
their work and publish it using resources that are not recoverable.
(This is different from publishing on a hard disk, which you can
readily erase.)  

Depending on the license, other people and other organizations may
deal with the same information.  The wider society sets up default
ground rules and default assumptions.

In decades past, when the cost of publishing was higher than it is
now, and when major technological advances were funded and controlled
in the US by oligopolies, the default ground rule was that the
oligopolies controlled the people and prevented other organizations
from doing anything exactly similar to what they did.  

That meant a competing oligopolist had to `invent around' the issue,
which was not too expensive for the oligopolist, but costly enough to
keep out most competitors.  (This is according to a study I read years
ago; I can hunt up the reference if you want.  The study was published
on paper in the 1970s or '80s and never put on the Web.)

The goal of the GNU project is to change the wider society's default
ground rules and default assumptions.  The new rules and assumptions
are those in which professionals, like the xemacs developers, are
legally permitted to cooperate and in which intermediate organizations
may legally be created and may legally act.

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         
    address@hidden                         GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  http://www.teak.cc