Re: The copyright issue (Was: Key bindings proposal)

[Stuart Hacking <stuhacking@gmail.com>]

On 5 August 2010 10:12, Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:

> But it seems that the FSF copyright policy has become a bugbear, which
> might not have been the original intention.  The current situation is
> highly asymmetric.  Anybody, including a private corporation, can use
> the FSF codebase to develop their variants, but Gnu Emacs can't use
> their enhancements to enrich itself.

It is indeed sad that some corporations feel unable to contribute back
to the community that supports them. This is not unique to GNU though.

> So, Gnu ends up lagging behind
> and, perhaps in cases like Aquamacs, not even being able to enter the
> territory.  It leads to more and more forking, making life hard for
> the package developers and becoming a disservice to the users.
>
> Can't we find a way out of this dilemma?

Correct me if I'm wrong but there aren't that many emacsen left out in
the wilds anymore. We have GNU Emacs and XEmacs.

Aquamacs and W32 Emacs are based of the GNU version. The
creators/maintainers of these branches are actively engaged in this
mailing list helping to improve the core project. Yet, they also
provide enhancements that help emacs to better fit the non-free
platforms. This is good for the users themselves.

This doesn't look like a major problem to me.*

--Stuart

* One day we'll live in a perfect world where everyone runs GNU/Linux,
etc, etc... let me know how that turns out.