Re: Adding BBDB 3 core to Emacs

[Thomas Fitzsimmons <fitzsim@fitzsim.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com>
>> Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 08:56:49 -0800
>> Cc: George McNinch <gmcninch@gmail.com>, Roland Winkler <winkler@gnu.org>,
>> 	bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> >>>>> Thomas Fitzsimmons <fitzsim@fitzsim.org> writes:
>> 
>> > I really like this idea. Then we could count on BBDB 3 (core) being in Emacs
>> > core. We could fix EUDC to always enable the BBDB backend by default,
>> > include an Info node in the manual for BBDB itself and fix the EUDC Info
>> > nodes to be BBDB 3-specific.
>> 
>> I would much prefer this to be in "tarball ELPA", so that it is included in
>> the distribution, but not a focus for the other developers. Would there be any
>> need to include it within core itself?
>
> Didn't BBDB have some copyright issues that precluded its distribution
> with Emacs or under the same license?  (Apologies if I'm
> misremembering.)

I'm not aware of any licensing issues.  All the files in BBDB 2.x are
either GPLv2 or any later version, or GPLv1 or any later version.

Most BBDB 2.x contributors have not signed FSF copyright assignment
papers though.  From what I've read, there have been attempts to get
paperwork for all BBDB contributors in the past, but they were
unsuccessful.

However, BBDB 3 represents a rewrite of the core portions of the
codebase by Roland.  I did a comparison between BBDB 2.x and BBDB 3
within the last year.  The core parts seem significantly different to
me, and Roland considers them in the clear now.

The proposal here is to split BBDB 3 into two portions; the "bbdb-core"
portion, and a "bbdb-extras" portion for code that is not
copyright-assigned.  "bbdb-core" would be acceptable from a copyright
perspective for inclusion in Emacs core or GNU ELPA.

Thomas