You need to get everyone with non-trivial contributions to the project to sign the FSF copyright assignment

document. You’ll also have to stop accepting non-trivial contributions from people who haven’t signed the document.

The latter is my primary problem with having a package go to ELPA as you’re losing a lot of useful contributions from GitHub,

as most folks are unlikely to want to deal with a paper document, which is unfortunate.

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 12:00 PM, chad <yandros@gmail.com> wrote:
On 09 Jul 2014, at 20:59, Matt DeBoard <matt.deboard@gmail.com> wrote:

> As regarding inclusion in GNU ELPA, I'm just a caretaker for the
> project on behalf of the Elixir-lang people, but as it's already in
> MELPA I'm sure it's fine.

I would go a step further than Stefan and say that MELPA is basically the archetype of not-fine in this domain: finding a package in MELPA means, basically "someone, somewhere, wrote some code that might do something, in some of the versions I've had at some point". Finding a package in GNU ELPA (or a handful of other elpa repositories) adds things like "this version should actually do what's written on the tin" to potentially-interesting properties like "copyrights already assigned" and "can be fixed by interested emacs maintainers".

I hope that helps,
~Chad