Releasing the Emacs guided tour into the public domain; also, video

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Jason Spiro writes:

 > 2007/3/7, Phil Sung <psung at mit.edu> wrote:
 > > Hi Jason,
 > >
 > > Thanks for writing. This sounds very cool!
 > >
 > > Under what license would the XEmacs documentation ultimately be
 > > offered? (GPL, I assume?) I'd be happy to dual-license the slides with
 > > the GFDL and the GPL. Please let me know if that's acceptable for
 > > XEmacs purposes, or if there's another license or whatnot.

The XEmacs Info documentation is licensed under the (nameless and
versionless) Emacs 19 documentation license.  Much XEmacs
documentation is in the form of embedded doctrings, which are under
the GPL.  The three licenses (ie, including the GFDL) are mutually
incompatible, and are only freely usable by a monopoly owner like the
FSF, unless multiply-licensed.

We can distribute GFDL documentation as-is, it's just effectively a
semi-free license from the point of view of XEmacs: it cannot be
combined with *any* of our core documentation.

I would guess that the GPL is more important than the doc license.
The reason is that I can forsee a tutorial helper that would allow the
user to run the examples in the tour in an XEmacs window next to the
guided tour.  This might be covered by "fair use", but I'd rather have
the explicit permission.

Thanks for your interest!

Steve