Hello emacs-devel:

I'm Alex Branham, one of the core developers of Emacs Speaks Statistics
(ESS), an elisp package that provides support for a few statistical
languages (R, julia, SAS, and BUGS/JAGS). You can find more info on our
website[1] or clone the code from github.[2]

We'd like to contribute ESS to the FSF so that it can become part of
Emacs. My understanding is that the copyright assignment process might
be the most difficult part. ESS is a very (30ish years) old project, and
so has many contributors, some of whom may not be able to sign the
paperwork.

Is there a process for figuring out who exactly needs to sign the FSF
copyright paperwork? Is it just authors of the current code according to
git-blame, or everyone who's contributed 15 lines of code, or something
else?

Thanks,
Alex

Footnotes:
[1]  https://ess.r-project.org/

[2]  https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS or git clone https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS.git