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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Phil Sung writes:

 > I have gotten a go-ahead to do the re-licensing. :) Could someone
 > point me to the text of the Emacs-19 documentation license? (I
 > couldn't find it in either XEmacs or GNU Emacs tarballs.)

Great!

The license in question is in the preamble of the Texinfo
documentation.  In the XEmacs distribution, that is in
man/xemacs/xemacs.texi.  I include a copy below.

It's a very simple license, compared to the GPL, but it is not a
"template license".  It is only usable with the old GNU Emacs manual
and derivatives (such as the XEmacs manual), and refers by name to
content that is not present in your tutorial.  This is messy, and
it's not clear to me what it might imply legally.

I suggest two options for your consideration:

1.  Grant us a single very permissive license, such as the "new BSD"
or MIT/X license.  These can be "promoted" to any of the licenses we
use.

2.  Use the "standard" permission notice referring to your preferred
license(s), and granting special permission to create certain
derivatives.  Something like "This Work may be distributed under the
GNU FDL, version N or any later version published by the FSF, or the
GNU GPL, version M or any later version published by the FSF, at your
option.  As a special exception, permission is granted to combine this
work verbatim or in modified form with any work derived from GNU Emacs
or its documentation as distributed by the FSF, and redistribute the
result under any copyleft license applicable to that derived work."

Be aware that I am not a lawyer.  Also, I won't be offended if you say
those options are not what you had in mind at all.

The unnamed XEmacs documentation license:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of
this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice
are preserved on all copies.

@ignore
Permission is granted to process this file through Tex and print the
results, provided the printed document carries copying permission
notice identical to this one except for the removal of this paragraph
(this paragraph not being relevant to the printed manual).

@end ignore
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the
sections entitled ``The GNU Manifesto'', ``Distribution'' and ``GNU
General Public License'' are included exactly as in the original, and
provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the
terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual
into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions,
except that the sections entitled ``The GNU Manifesto'',
``Distribution'' and ``GNU General Public License'' may be included in a
translation approved by the author instead of in the original English.
------------------------------------------------------------------------