Re: Some hard numbers on licenses used by elisp packages

[Mats Lidell <mats.lidell@cag.se>]

> Richard Stallman writes:
> How useful is that package?

[1]

Pragmatically I would say that small packages, like this, generally would not
be that useful. But again for a few users it could be a very useful
package. Who can tell or judge that?

> It may be possible to find the person's heirs.  It would be some work,
> though.  How much work would that package be worth?

In this case it might be possible to find the heirs but generally I suspect
that can be very difficult if not impossible. So for a small package I suspect
that it is easier to give it a new implementation. But theoretically that will
not solve the issue I guess since the new implementation would not really
replace the old one so that would still be around.

These are the tricky questions you wind up in when there is no license and I
don't know the proper way out of it if there is any. I suspect at some distant
time in the future an unmaintained package will break and will be removed for
that reason.

Yours Mats

Footnotes: [1] This is my investigation about the author. The package is
https://github.com/Raynes/refheap.el. When the authors email given at github
did not work I search the net to find this
article. https://www.facebook.com/lancepantz/posts/10104155686547809?pnref=story
Which links to the memory page of Anthony Grimes. The github profile picture
is there and the authors interest in clojure indicates a match.