Re: Some ideas with Emacs

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2019-12-02, at 22:19, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:

>>> Similarly, how/why would you list the differences for a translation of
>>> the book (other than "translated from Foo by Bar")?
>> This is a different thing - and most probably requiring a green light
>> from the original author.
>
> Not being allowed to write (and share) a translation without the
> author's explicit consent is a big downer.  I'd consider this firmly on
> the side of "not Free".

I never said I want to write a "free" (as in FSF) book.  (I wouldn't
totally exclude such a possibility, though, it's just not my current
plan.)  My opinion is that "free" (as in "free software" and "free
documentation") is a bad idea for books in general.

IOW, while I probably could agree that CC-ND might be a bit too harsh,
it is certainly better than GFDL (which is way too lax) in such a case.

In yet another words, even if I decide to release my book under GFDL one
day (assuming I manage to write it, which I consider quite probable -
after all, I'm finishing work on a third book with me as a (co)author),
I still think that at least for books better than mine GFDL is a bad
idea.

> I can agree that the author may not want to have his name directly
> attached to the translation, but that's a far cry from disallowing
> translations altogether.

I didn't say "disallowing".  I said "disallowing without an explicit
consent".  Have you heard the story about the infamous Swedish
translation of LotR?  While I would not compare any of my books (written
or to-be-written) with that of master JRRT, this is an important
cautionary tale.

I can live with manuals/documentation which are not good literature
(even though it's a pity, and I very much prefer ones that are
well-written - see e.g. DEK's The TeXbook).  Not so much for books (even
if _my_ books are only mediocre literature at best).

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl