Re: Unibyte characters, strings, and buffers

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

David Kastrup writes:
 > Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

 > > I never blamed anyone.  People should know the true state of
 > > affairs, and then decide for themselves.

Not in Emacs.  It's not up to the individual contributor, it's a
matter for project policy, ie, RMS as advised by the FSF legal dept.

 > The true state of affairs is that the U.S. legal and political system
 > does not leave much leeway for paranoia.  It's as bad as imagination
 > gets.

Oh, come on, David.  A German writes this in a thread that a resident
of Japan participates in?  Have you no sense of history?

Indeed, the reach of copyright and patent in the U.S. system has gone
way beyond the bounds that even a Milton Friedman can sanction.  But
it's not hard to imagine worse, even in just that limited area of law.

Bottom line: Eli's theoretical assessment of the "typical" risks
involved seems pretty plausible to me.  But in the worst case, things
can get pretty bad, and it's easy to justify "legal paranoia" on the
part of the FSF in managing software freedom of selected critical
projects, including Emacs.