Re: ELPA policy

[David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>]

>> Indeed, one possibility would be to simply close GNU ELPA for everything
>> but core or maybe-in-the-future-core packages. Is that what you're
>> proposing?
>
> I don't have any proposals yet, because I still don't have a clear
> idea of what is (or should be) the relation between Emacs and ELPA,
> nor even what are the goals of adding packages to ELPA which clearly
> couldn't be added to core even if we wanted.  And with Stefan's
> proposal to drop the copyright assignment requirement, bringing them
> into core will even harder.  But OTOH Stefan says that requesting the
> assignment is harmful to the Emacs project.  So I'm utterly confused
> regarding our goals in this regard.

Even if we drop the FSF copyright requirement, we still would have
requirements that MELPA does not have, like not supporting/promoting
non-free software, GPLv3-or-later license (MELPA only requires
GPL-compatible), and probably (and unfortunately, IMHO) also the
requirement to not depend on free software that is seen critical by the
FSF, like LLVM/clang.

My hope is that if we could drop the FSF copyright requirement for
non-core packages, we at least could try to get popular and useful
packages into GNU ELPA, we could make them prominently visible and easy
to install without the user having to put anything into her dotemacs,
and we could show the power of Emacs that is visible in these packages
on our main web site, in videos, etc.

-David