Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

David Kastrup writes:
 > "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

 > > [David pointed this out elsewhere, but I want to emphasize: GUILE
 > > distributed as a part of Emacs is GPL, not LGPL, and the protection of
 > > the GPL extends to all code in the Emacs process space.  GuileEmacs
 > > can be distributed only because the LGPL allows promotion to GPL.]
 > 
 > "process space" is not a legal concept.

No, but it is a rule of thumb used by a lot of lawyers, and in the
U.S. at least, judges.  It comes close for many purposes.

 > Nobody claims that ld.so is a derivative of all the software it
 > ends up sharing process space with.

I didn't write that /lib/ld-linux.so.2 is a derivative.  The object in
memory is a derivative (but that doesn't matter for the GPL or LGPL
unless you dump the memory to a file).  What it does is show that
somebody intended to create a derivative of the various files loaded
into memory, and that is relevant to judging whether certain files
scattered around the Internet should be considered to be a Work
covered by the GPL.

It's hard to prove that this was the intention *of the author*.  The
point of the "I-am-GPL" API is precisely that it forces an author to
make her intention public.  The question is whether Richard will side
with the omelette (Emacs's GPL) or with the eggs (the Guile-specific
modules that don't call the "I-am-GPL" API).  My bet is on the
omelette, but we'll see when it actually comes down to that.  (Richard
is usually firm about not making up his mind until there's actually a
problem to be solved.)