Copyright (was: Re: Thanks!)

Wed Jul 21 16:06:34 CEST 2010

On 2010-07-19 19:41, Štěpán Němec wrote:

> All in all, I don't see any reason whatsoever to want to have one's
> package included into Emacs, and the "inclusionism" a lot of people
> seem to indulge in seems just ridiculous to me -- there's no point
> in having everything in Emacs core. In fact, a lot of current core
> libraries, including Viper, would make much more sense as external
> packages.

You have a point, of course. Actually, the very package that got me
started with Emacs in the first place -- AUCTeX -- is not included
as part of Emacs.

Then there's the mentioned issue of "copyright significance" --
apparently, the threshold is somewhere at 15 lines.[1] I don't get how
this is supposed to go together with distributed development, at all.
Paradoxically, the more /successful/ a project becomes -- the more
people get involved and contribute their time and (sometimes) huge
chunks of code -- the harder it becomes to get the thing approved.

(Of course, since we migrated from SVN to Git, it has become even
easier for anyone to experiment locally and submit their work, fully
credited, if useful to others. And that's really the point.)

I don't see how open software can breathe and grow under these
regulations. I don't understand the Free Software Foundation's stance
on software freedom. If I have to choose, I'll pick an inclusionist
stance on contributed code over an inclusionist stance on Emacs'
libraries, any old day of the week.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.vim-emulation/45/

-- 
Vegard