Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

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

David Kastrup writes:

 > But you can't.  There is no point in slapping a license on a
 > distribution when you don't have standing to sue over license breaches
 > since you are not holding copyright to any significant part of it.
 > 
 > It only weakens the GPL if you start creating situations where it cannot
 > be taken seriously and/or enforced.

I see.  So the widespread use of GPL in projects that don't collect
assignments is another excuse to declare a piece of software an enemy
of the movement.

Seriously, I disagree.  Sure, somebody who really wants to take it
proprietary can do so.  But they can do that with most GPL'ed software
too by making their derivative a webapp.

 > > OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice ... doesn't that undermine your point?
 > 
 > If you take a look at R.C.Weir venting off in the comment section of
 > basically every publication delivering a LibreOffice release
 > announcement, that "a little miffed" is not a mere hypothetical.

Once again, if he's really venting about the license (and not about
"who is the real successor to Sun OpenOffice.org"), that's crazy.  If
Apache didn't want to enable one-way code flow, they wouldn't use a
permissive license.  (Who is R.C.Weir, anyway?  I seem to recall a
Grateful Dead guitarist by that name....)