Subject: [[email-masked]: Re: Yggdrasil Pressure on the LDP] (fwd)
From: Terry Dawson <[email-masked]>
To: Linux Documentation Project writers <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 19:09:17 +1000 (EST)

Forwarded message:
>From [email-masked] Fri Jul 14 18:18 EST 1995
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 01:17:56 -0700
From: "Richard M. Stallman" <[email-masked]>
Message-Id: <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [[email-masked]: Re: Yggdrasil Pressure on the LDP]
Reply-to: [email-masked]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 2174

Here is the first.

Date: Tue, 11 Jul 1995 17:07:27 -0700
From: "Richard M. Stallman" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
CC: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
        [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
        [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
        [email-masked], [email-masked]
cc: [email-masked]
In-reply-to: <[email-masked]> (message from Matt Welsh on Sun, 9 Jul 1995 12:43:33 -0400)
Subject: Re: Yggdrasil Pressure on the LDP
Reply-to: [email-masked]

    I find this tactic of yours to be completely underhanded and quite
    disrespectful. In fact, I'm offended to the point where I may not 
    give Yggdrasil or the Free Software Foundation permission to publish 
    or make profit from any of my own works in the future.

I think it would be a shame to punish the Free Software Foundation
because you feel offended by Yggdrasil.  I've tried in the past to
convince you to make LDP books free, and for a while I thought I had
succeeded, but your message was the first I'd heard of Yggdrasil's
donation scheme.

The Free Software Foundation has been flexible about using free
software and documentation with various different distribution terms.
But there is a limit to this flexibility: we can only use things that
are free.  Free means that users have the freedom to redistribute the
work and to modify it functionally in some practical fashion.

Users can modify all the software we redistribute; if they can't
modify the documentation to describe accurately the modified software,
they are effectively blocked from doing the responsible thing and
documenting their work.

It can be very useful to adapt documentation to purposes that its
authors did not anticipate.  Soon there will be a version of Mach that
can use device drivers written for Linux.  It would be very natural to
adapt the KHG to describe this, if its terms permitted modification.

You can set the terms on the books you write any way you wish.  All I
can do is try to convince you that it would be useful to remove
certain restrictions.