Re: Unibyte characters, strings, and buffers

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Cc: dancol@dancol.org,
>     monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA,
>     emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 13:20:40 +0900
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
> In that case if there were enough similarity that the FSF were taken
> to court and the case not dismissed immediately, the "it's just an
> accident" argument would not fly in court because it would be easy
> to show that I know a lot about the XEmacs implementation, and I
> personally would undoubtedly be at best greatly inconvenienced by
> being called to testify, at worst liable for damages (remember, in
> that case the FSF assignment makes me liable for FSF's court costs
> and damages, and that agreement doesn't contain mitigating
> circumstances like "in good faith" or "invited by Eli Z").
> 
> No, thank you.

My goal is not to convince you to do something you don't want to.

The main issue here, at least for me, is not whether Mr. X wants to
describe an existing implementation -- we obviously cannot do anything
if he doesn't, no matter what are his reasons.  The main issue here
is, once Mr. X _did_ describe such an implementation, is it OK for
someone else, who is not familiar with the actual code, to
re-implement it from scratch, and then submit it to Emacs as their
own, under assigned copyright.  My conclusion from everything I know
and read is that YES, it is OK.

IOW, I'd like to avoid the situation where others here might become
intimidated by what you wrote in a broader sense, and will as result
refrain from participating in discussions that reveal details of other
implementations, or from assigning their code written based on those
discussions.  That would cause some real damage to Emacs.