Re: The copyright issue

[Adrian Robert]

Dan Nicolaescu <dann <at> gnu.org> writes:


> > You're confusing the license with the *policy*.  It's not the GPL that
> > prevents Aquamacs features from being folded in.  It's the Emacs project
> > leads in particular, setting and enforcing policy.
> 
> Even that is not quite the case.  Almost none of the Aquamacs changes
> have even been proposed for inclusion here.  Some might be acceptable,
> but we'll never know as long as there's no desire to merge them...

Actually, I would say the merging of the NS port was kind of a test case,
because it had a number of features that weren't quite as Mac-specific in
function or extensive in implementation as Aquamacs, that the maintainer (me)
wanted to bring in.  There was various debate on the specifics of particular
cases, but in the end most things that were not already implemented at least by
the X11 port were removed.  

My impression was that the standards for admitting a feature, particularly if it
is implemented only on one platform at first, are a bit different if it is the
X11 port introducing it rather than one of the ports to non-free platforms. 
This could result from the typical usage of the lead maintainers, the historic
origins of the project, or both.  Nothing wrong with it.

But it seems clear that the even more NS/Mac-specific orientation of many of
Aquamacs's features would be even less likely to be accepted.  And again,
nothing wrong with that.  David Reitter and Yamamoto Mitsuharu, maintainer of
another Mac-specific fork, are in agreement that the best place for such
features IS in forks / third-party distributions.

(I happen to disagree, but I've already said my piece on the issue before on
emacs-devel, and these kinds of policies ARE up to the project leads, so I'm
happy to leave it.)


-Adrian