evangelizing xemacs with a graphical tutorial

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Jason Spiro writes:

 > The files are OpenDocument Presentation files and equivalent PDFs.
 > So, it is unlikely you'll want to copy content between the
 > presentation and the rest of xemacs.

I think you underestimate the power of XEmacs.  OpenDocument files are
xml, no?  So it would not be hard to extract relevant parts from those
files and put them into manuals or docstrings, or vice versa.

Vice versa is actually more likely, since we would presumably wish to
include XEmacs-specific changes.  But it is problematic because we
don't have the option of multiple licensing ourselves; the FSF has
been unhelpful, and in any case with very diffuse ownership getting
the necessary permissions to relicense is generally a very uncertain
process.

For this reason, we may want to distribute them separately simply to
make the point that the license is incompatible.  This doesn't prevent
the package from hooking in to the menus and so on, it just means that
a certain subset of users (namely, those who don't use the full set of
packages for some reason) would have to go to extra effort to get the
fancy tutorial.

 > Or, if you prefer, I can contact the author and ask him to
 > dual-license the files under different terms as well.

The problem is not the author's license, really.  It's ours.

Of course multiple licensing would be desirable from our point of
view, but it's still not enough to guarantee inclusion in the core
distribution, because of the problem that copying XEmacs-specific
material from the core into the new tutorial would force a particular
license.

For multiple licensing to be maximally useful to us, we need both the
GPL and the unnamed XEmacs documentation license (ie, the one we
inherited from GNU Emacs 19, which is similar in intent to the GFDL,
but legally incompatible in both directions with it because of the
anti-DRM clause for one).

The latter license is found in the header of XEmacs Texinfo source
files.