Re: Packages, release notes, etc

[Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org>]

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<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

>> > With respect to license, I think it is not even possible for an
>> > emacs package to have a license different than GPL version 3 or
>> > later.  Each package is a combined work of emacs + X so the emacs
>> > license extends to the package.  That's probably the reason why
>> > there's no special License field in the standard headers.
>> Hm, so it isn't possible to distribute a package that is in the
>> public domain or maybe one that is Artistic ver. 2.0 licensed via
>> ELPA or one of the other repositories? I doubt that.
>
> This looks strange to me too. Tassilo: are you sure you didn't mean
> "...to have a license incompatible than GPLV3 [or later]"?

No, I've meant what I said.  You can write a GPL program and thereby use
other libraries with GPL-compatible licenses.  But as soon as you use a
GPL library in your program, that program must also be GPL.  That's why
the GPL is called a copyleft license.

Well, I'm actually not absolutely certain that it must be exactly GPL
but at least its license must ensure the very same freedoms the GPL
ensures.  So "must be GPL" should be correct at least for practical
terms.

> Of course, the "or later" is the hard part here.  How do we know that
> Apache V2 is compatible with yet-to-know GPLV4?

Even if I'm right which I think I am, that's indeed a good question.
I'd say my elisp package X must be licensed at least under the GPL
version which covers the minimum version of emacs which is required to
use the package.  So if my package only requires emacs 21, then I can
probably release it as GPLv2 (an no later).  Of course that would be a
bad decision as it would preclude others from building another package
on top of mine and other packages or recent versions of emacs.

Well, but here I'm just guessing.

Bye,
Tassilo

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