🚀 go-pugleaf

dblake@dylan.ucsf.edu (Dave Blake ) writes:

> Donal K. Fellows wrote:
> >Or does RMs hold the (IMHO ridiculous) position that if someone writes
> >a book about GNU Emacs, then the content of that book[*] should[**] be
> >given away free?  
> 
> Copylefted.
> 
> If someone like O'Reilly is printing good documentation books,
> it will act to prevent people from writing good free (or at
> least copylefted) ones.
> 
> This is my understanding of rms' take on documentation manuals.

More particular, it is his take on basically *essential*
documentation.  For example, Perl comes with a bunch of loosely
organized man pages and FAQ last time I looked, something from which
learning the language is not impossible, but rather difficult.  The
documentation copiously mentions that you might also want to acquire
the proprietary Camel book of O'Reilly.

This is not the sort of free documentation RMS thinks desirable for
free software.  And he does not wish to have people thinking that free
software is complete without good and reasonably complete free
documentation accompanying it.

> The dude has ethics.

What have ethics to do with what he wants other people to do?  At
least the standard manuals on Emacs and Elisp try to be complete and
usable (navigating the Emacs info with Emacs is much more helpful than
navigating the Perl manpages), and freely redistributable, to boot.


-- 
David Kastrup                                     Phone: +49-234-700-5570
Email: dak@neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de       Fax: +49-234-709-4209
Institut f�r Neuroinformatik, Universit�tsstr. 150, 44780 Bochum, Germany