Re: Copyright/Distribution questions (Emacs/Orgmode)

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

Carsten Dominik writes:
 > 
 > On 12.3.2013, at 03:33, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
 > > 
 > > Jambunathan is claiming that he has not yet designated this work as
 > > within the scope of Emacs, but he may be ignorant of the legal
 > > implications of committing code to certain repositories.  On the other
 > > hand, a court might construe his ignorance to mean that no intent to
 > > contribute was present.
 > 
 > It is easy to see and prove that the intent from day on was to become
 > part of Emacs.

If so, then I would suppose the assignment is valid and can't be
unilaterally retracted.  If I were Stefan, I'd probably still ask that
those files be revised to remove his content.  (I've actually had to
make such a decision; a 3rd party provided a port of XEmacs to Mac OS
X, dedicating the code to the public domain.  Only problem is that in
the process he removed GPL notices placed in files he copied from our
repository.  I put them back, incredibly enough he bitched about that
and about the notices that XEmacs is GPL, and that code has never been
integrated, although it's still in our repos on a branch.)

In any case, my main point was to refute the contention that an
assignment means you can't write your own Emacs or even fork Emacs.
It doesn't.  You might have to call it something else, I guess, to
avoid confusion.