Re: Tests and copyright

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

David Engster writes:

 > > I don't see why they wouldn't [require assignment], if they're
 > > distributed.  They're just as much the original work of an author.
 > 
 > AFAIK, they are not distributed with the tarballs.

Any "conveying" to a third party is distribution for legal purposes.
That's defined in the GPL, and includes publicly accessible VCS repos.

However, there's no law that requires assignment; it's purely a policy
of the GNU Project (at least, I don't think Stefan would be allowed to
unilaterally end it, even if he wanted to) with respect to "GNU
Emacs".  I'm pretty sure that the Emacs maintainers would want to
consider the test suite "part of Emacs", so the same rules would
likely apply.  But you'd have to ask whoever sets such policies (I
would guess RMS, but maybe the FSF Board or Stefan).