Subject: Re: Another view of the LDP vs. Yggdrasil/FSF religious war (fwd)
From: Kai Harrekilde-Petersen <[email-masked]>
To: Linux Documentation Project writers <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 1995 17:27:46 +0200 (MET DST)

Hi everyone,

On Adam's request the following,

Adam J. Richter writes:

I wrote:
>This is all fine and well, but why didn't you take the time to just
>mail us guys explaining this?

	I explained and apologized for this in my original
letter.  However, it is not surprising that you may have
missed it because I am not able to send mail to (or join)
the [email-masked] list due to some technical
problem at Cornell.  Here is my original response.
Please send it to ldp-l so that the other authors do
not feel that they are being ignored.

Adam

--------------------------CUT HERE------------------------------

        A fundamental basis on which Yggdrasil was founded and
has always operated is that content (software, documentation,
even sound and video) that is free "in the GNU sense" represents
a much greater contribution than content that is less freely
redistributable.  We do not claim that proprietary content as evil,
but we think that GNU-compatible content is much more valuable than
anything even slightly more restricted.

        We are trying to be careful to respect the autonomy of the
LDP organization.  Our intent in paying the conditional part of our
financial support directly to recipients is to confirm the LDP
organization's political independence both in practice and
public perception from a policy which is not its own.

        We donate to promote and develop software and other content that
is freely redistributable under conditions not more restrictive than the
GNU General Public License and sometimes to create good will.  In
linux.dev.doc, I had previously encouraged people to adopt GPL-compatible
licenses for their documentation, and those who responded generally
responded favorably, but nobody actually executed such a change, so
it was apparent that a nudge was necessary.  This slight redeployment
of our donation money provides that nudge and brings our donation
actions more in line with our aims.  We don't require that the LDP
organization adopt our aims, but I think that the LDP organization's
involvement in this donation ends at the $.25 pretax per book that
the organization is getting.  The rest is a private offer from
a publisher to some authors.

        Having said all of this, I must apologize for failing to
get an explanation of this change to the LDP mailing list before 
the comp.os.linux.announce posting.  I had hoped to get all of
the financial and legal details of our donation into a single
message (which I am still working on after three days), but I can
see that a quicker message would have been better.  I understand
why people might have felt insulted by not getting a notified ahead
of time, and I am sorry for that.

Adam J. Richter                           Yggdrasil Computing, Incorporated
(408) 261-6630                            "Free Software For The Rest of Us."

Kai
-- 
Kai Harrekilde-Petersen  <[email-masked]>  Linux: choice of a GNU generation
>> Inside every little problem there's a BIG problem, struggling to get out <<