Licensing question

Licensing question

[Brian Leung]

If I copy and properly attribute code distributed under a GPL-compatible license like Apache 2 or Expat, will the code necessarily be ineligible for inclusion in GNU Emacs?

My specific problem: the tree-sitter library has garnered some interest as a tool for structured editing. Assume, for the sake of this discussion, that Emacs has support for it. I would like to read through https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter/ to figure out how to develop some user-facing features. But nvim-tree-sitter is distributed under an Apache 2 license, so I'm not sure what I can do with their code.

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Re: Licensing question

[Stefan Monnier]

> If I copy and properly attribute code distributed under a GPL-compatible
> license like Apache 2 or Expat, will the code necessarily be ineligible for
> inclusion in GNU Emacs?

Except for rare exceptions, in order to include code in Emacs, the
code's copyright needs to be transferred to the FSF, at which point the
FSF can choose to use the GPLv3+ regardless of the original license of
the code.

IOW the question is not "what is the original license" but "has the
copyright owner signed the copyright paperwork".

In your example, I'd say the main question is: did you copy enough of
the code you've seen that we'll need to get the copyright paperwork from
the nvim-tree-sitter author?
And the question would be the same for any other license (whether GPLv3,
proprietary, you name it).


        Stefan