Re: Drop the Copyright Assignment requirement for Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 9 May 2020 10:48:34 +0100
> Cc: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> That was my impression initially too.  But in practice it evolved to
> a place for the "not quite ready for prime-time" cases: i.e. we
> let most everything in, provided they have copyright and adhere
> to some minimal conventions.  So we don't uphold the same
> standard there, never did, I think.  Nowadays, I see ELPA as a
> staging place for packages to come in, eventually make it into core
> _and_ back into ELPA as :core packages.

What is the process of becoming :core? is that documented somewhere?
E.g., is dash.el undergo such a process to be better suited for core?
Or will dash.el never be in core (in which case see below)?

> FWIW, I don't fully agree with Stefan: we should not require
> copyright assignment for inclusion in GNU ELPA if that introduces
> needless friction, but we should require of authors, maintainers or
> proponents that they make an effort to track down the contributors
> and solve this, otherwise it makes no sense for it to be there.
> 
> Finally, above practical aspects, assigning copyright is declaring
> support for an idea larger than the FSF itself.  It's a political
> declaration.  I think the reason some people take issue with it
> is seeing their names vanish from the first few lines of the source
> file, and be replaced by something they don't agree with, or
> don't understand.

Then I ask again the same question: why not let these packages live on
MELPA or in GitHub or anywhere else?  What do we and the package
maintainers gain from having these packages on ELPA?

Still confused.