Re: Licence of ts-comint

["Jostein Kjønigsen" <jostein@secure.kjonigsen.net>]

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Hey Jean.

Thanks for the email.

I'll be frank and admit I don't really care *that* much about licensing
as long as software I use is open-source. That applies to stuff I write
and maintain myself.
(Prepare for a slight rant)

With that said, I'm a bit put off by how much effort the FSF/GNU puts
into copyright and licensing of code, as opposed ... the code itself.
The whole GCC AST thing and debate about the "freeness" of the AST lead
to LLVM being made. For similar reasons, Emacs and GUD has for a long
time not supported a Elf-3 capable debugger, because before GDB got that
capability that would mean supporting LLDB, which would be "bad" (it not
being GPL-licensed and all).
I've seen this quote on some forum online: "The FSF was formed to
replace proprietary software with free software. Having succeeded, it
now lives on to replace free software with free software".
It's obviously meant as a joke, but I hope you can see where that joke
is coming from. Is this really where your effort is best spent?
And now this... I honestly find the *churn* the FSF is putting on its
GPL licenses quite baffling.
If the GPL v1 was good enough for free software... Why on earth should
the FSF develop and deploy a new license which renders all former GPLed
code "incompatible" (as you put it)? I'm lost for words. Are there
really anyone besides Richard M. Stallmann who condones this move?
If you now make the GPL-license incompatible not only with BSD or
MIT-type licenses, but also the GPL license itself... Prepare to be
even further berated next time the GPL vs BSD-license is up for
debate in online forums. Why put so much effort into making license
compliance so hard?
From the outside looking in, it looks like needlessly inconveniencing
the very people who made stuff for your platform.
You're obviously free to do whatever you please, but to me this just
seems a  misguided. If your goal is to  promote free software, how do
you see this helping?
(End of rant)

That said... My  small and pretty insignificant package is already
licensed "GPL 2 or whatever newer comes along".
If you still think this is "incompatible" and needs an upgrade, and if
you are willing to do the leg-work... You know where my repo is. Feel
free to issue a pull-request and I'll have it merged.
--
Yours truly
Jostein Kjønigsen

jostein@kjonigsen.net 🍵 jostein@gmail.com
https://jostein.kjonigsen.net


On Sat, Aug 12, 2017, at 10:24 AM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In a thread in the emacs-devel maillist, the licensing situation for
> emacs
> packages provided through Emacs package archives has been under
> focus. I> have
> volunteered to contact the authors of packages that have a
> license that> is
> incompatible with Emacs, which is now under GPL-3+.
> 
> See
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-07/msg01069.html> 
> So I wonder if you could consider to change the license of your
> package> to
> GPL-3+?
> 
> Also, you may have noticed that the package from which ts-comint is
> forked has recently moved to GPL3+.
> https://github.com/redguardtoo/js-comint/commit/eb4744122724b24e492c2171fff438e3ee2045a8> 
> Yours,
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary


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