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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Phil Sung writes:

 > Alas, I recently (about a week ago) assigned my copyright for the
 > slides to the FSF for contribution to GNU Emacs. I am not sure whether
 > they could be persuaded to release this work into the public domain (I
 > assume that it is their decision to make now).

It would violate their principles to release it into the public domain
(and there are various reasons why that is potentially disadvantageous
to you as author, anyway, although mostly those apply to programs rather
than documentation).

However, under the standard license assignment you have the right to
"make any use of the assigned work you wish" or something like that.
FSF supporters (ie, not the legal staff) typically say that means that
the FSF will give a license to anybody you specify under any terms the
author specifes (as long as those terms are non-exclusive).  There's
definitely a possibility.

If you ask the copyright clerk of the FSF he/she will be able to tell
you whether a license to XEmacs would be granted for redistribution
under the GPL and/or the Emacs 19 documentation license.  If you would
do that, we would appreciate it (the GPL is the more important of
those two).  In some versions of the assignment, this sublicense is
from you, in others, it's from the FSF, so you'd have to ask to find
out how to do it anyway.

In any case, GFDL-only terms are, as you say, suboptimal, but
nevertheless extremely generous.  I have no intention of looking this
gift horse in the mouth. :-)  Thank you very much!

Steve