Re: Please explain the FSF copyright assignment thing

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > For the latter: it looks like distributions of Emacs itself violated the 
  > GPL, right?

"Distributions of Emacs itself" is somewhat vague.  I don't know what
that includes, or what you mean by saying that the violated the GPL.
I can only treat this as a rumor.

If you're talking about the FSF's distribution of Emacs, strictly
speaking an error would not be a violation.  That is because the FSF
is the copyright holder.  Because we give this moral issue the highest
priority, we would correct the error right away.

  > Now if a violation occurs, who will be the judge?

The legal system judges legal disputes.  It is not perfect, but we
have already made it work for enforcing the GPL, and other developers
have too.

We have a published policy that our goal in dealing with GPL violations
is to bring the violator into full compliance, and we try to do this
first with private discussions.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.