The copyright issue (Was: Key bindings proposal)

[Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:

> BTW, you forgot David Reitter, who must fork because Aquamacs is
> dedicated to implementing features that make his proprietary platform
> (the Mac) more attractive for users than free platforms -- and such
> features are not allowed as a matter of Emacs policy.

I suppose this is a legal issue, and can't just be settled by
newsgroup debates.

But it seems that the FSF copyright policy has become a bugbear, which
might not have been the original intention.  The current situation is
highly asymmetric.  Anybody, including a private corporation, can use
the FSF codebase to develop their variants, but Gnu Emacs can't use
their enhancements to enrich itself.  So, Gnu ends up lagging behind
and, perhaps in cases like Aquamacs, not even being able to enter the
territory.  It leads to more and more forking, making life hard for
the package developers and becoming a disservice to the users.

Can't we find a way out of this dilemma?

Cheers,
Uday