Re: Adding BBDB 3 core to Emacs

[David Kastrup]

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

> Roland Winkler writes:
>  > On Mon Nov 23 2015 Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>  > >  > Have you looked at the new code?
>  > > 
>  > > I don't need to; I trust you that 'most every line has been
>  > > changed, and many functions completely rewritten.  The point is
>  > > that old configuration works with very little change with the new
>  > > code.  Therefore it stinks of "derivative work" to me.
>  > 
>  > Your view
>
> It's not "my view", it's Emacs project policy as designed by Richard
> Stallman with the advice of the FSF lawyers.  Ask the AUCTeX guys how
> picky it gets. :-(

The AUCTeX guys did not have problems with reimplementations being
tagged as problematic.  The principal problem was that we had about a
decade of loosely attributed work.  We've managed to collect assignments
from all the known main contributors and past maintainers and most
people with known or unknown contributions (basically mentioned in the
"thanks" section but without an actual record, some not even remembering
that they should have contributed anything).  So we are in "to the best
of our knowledge" territory with regard to assignments and fairly sure
that we can fill in any potential holes caused by people complaining
about AUCTeX's distribution under (c) FSF claims.

That was an ugly and ungrateful mess to deal with, but theories of weak
or strong derivation did not play into it.  Yet.  There were a few
rewrites from scratch for style files where the original author could no
longer be reached or bothered.  Those files were basically "flat" with
regard to creative content, namely containing no tricky or high-quality
code or even any new data structures/algorithms.

So with regard to the problem you are talking about, AUCTeX does not
really provide any data point either way.

>  > would never allow a program like libreoffice to come into
>  > existence.
>
> It's not what others can do with BBDB code that matters.  AFAIK
> there's no doubt that it's GPL.  What matters is whether the FSF legal
> staff can be convinced it's not encumbered by third-party copyrights.

I have no knowledge of BBDB myself so I cannot sport an opinion on that.

-- 
David Kastrup