Re: Icon designer wanted (Aquamacs Emacs)

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On 3 Jan 2006, at 15:34, David Kastrup wrote:

> If the people understand about the "spirit of free software", they are
> likely to understand the need for a copyright assignment or disclaimer
> (for icons, I guess a disclaimer would be sufficient).  It is a
> written guarantee that the licensing conditions are stated accurately.

Most people publish their work under some Creative Commons license,  
and as far as I know that's compatible.
Contributing to Emacs involves obtaining a contract from the FSF and  
signing that (paper form) -- I understand that is what was necessary  
when the new application icon was contributed. Taking code from 20 or  
so authors and getting all of them to sign this is probably what's  
needed when you do patch work. Ask the FSF if you're interested in  
knowing more, I sure don't know much about this stuff (and I don't  
want to deal with it either).

>>   Therefore, if someone is
>> willing to do the work, I'd incorporate this in our distribution
>> now.
>
> Willing to do _what_ work?  Designing icons?  Collecting them without
> contacting the authors?

All. Somebody will need to find icons and check their copyright  
status (as far as reasonably possible), design the ones that are  
missing, keep a list of where everything came from, maybe notify but  
at least acknowledge the authors.


>  It is a pity that you are not interested in the effort needed to
> improve Emacs for everybody.  You certainly have the right to do so,
> and this right is a consequence of Emacs being free software, but it
> does not help the cause.

Around 50 percent of my time on Aquamacs goes into troubleshooting  
people's bug reports, checking whether they actually report potential  
bugs in Emacs or a package and relaying the reports (in a form useful  
to the recipients) to Emacs.

By the way, I would probably do more of that for AUCTeX (for the few  
report's we're getting) if I could see that such reports were  
followed up on in a friendly and professional manner (even if the  
user or I make a mistake and report something that's not actually a  
bug).

> But you should be honest and clear enough when recruiting people to
> _your_ project to mention that this is not intended to help Emacs.
> And also you should refrain from calling Emacs or GNU "Open Source",
> in particular on GNU lists, which is an expression intended to muddle
> what free software is about: freedom.

Please, read the original post again and tell me where exactly I make  
wrong claims, or what is unclear.
I clearly state what it's for, and I do not talk of the main GNU  
Emacs as non-free or open source software.

> Even if he did the stuff himself, he has no guarantee that you
> would bother extricating it from your personal fork, making sure that
> nothing infringing remains, and properly contribute it to Emacs.

Excuse me, but we supply source code and maintain an open-access CVS  
repository. We document what's where, and other distributions such as  
the Carbon Emacs Package take code from us every now and then (and  
we're taking theirs). It's a public project, everyone can check out  
the code and it's easy enough to extract things if you're willing to  
do so.

You can hardly blame me for not willing to convince you personally  
that a particular change is justified, given the tone of your e-mails.