Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Jacob Bachmeyer <jcb62281@gmail.com>]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > More specifically, if a future version of GCC, buildable as a Guile 
>   > extension, offers access to its AST through a Guile API, would nonfree 
>   > programs be able to use the GCC API, or would the GPL protections cover 
>   > GCC's API?
>
> Yes.  And the same is the case with GCC's existing API for plug-ins.

I just realized that my question was very badly worded, with two 
positive alternatives, one good and one bad.  Is that the good "yes, the 
GPL would cover the API" or the bad "yes, sadly, nonfree programs could 
use the API"?  I think that it is the good alternative, since the 
existing GCC plugin API would never have been implemented otherwise, but 
there has been plenty of confusion around this topic already, so I ask 
for clarification.