Re: Basic legal question: Publication of a fix to psgml

[Dmitry Gutov]

florian@fsavigny.de (Florian v. Savigny) writes:

> although this is a legal question, I am confident enough that most
> people know the answer. It is this:
>
> Some months ago, I fixed the "old-style backquotes" problem in psgml
> (which was fairly straightforward, even if I did not even know what
> backquotes are about), and I had inquired about this on this list
> beforehand. Back then, Stefan Monnier suggested that we should track
> down the other contributors to find out about copyright to see if the
> fix can be put on ELPA. We have tried this, but many of them do not
> seem to be available.
>
> Now, my question is this: Given that Lennart released it under the GPL
> (there is no separate LICENSE file, but all the .el files contain the
> standard sentences to that effect), do I actually need any previous
> contributors' permission to make the fix publicly available? (The
> problem is not that I do not want to ask them, but rather that it has
> turned out to be more time-consuming than I can afford.) Or,
> alternatively, could I simply publish a patch?

IANAL, but as long as the original code is licensed under GPL, you can
absolutely publish the patch, and the modified code.

You won't be able to distribute it via GNU ELPA or together with GNU
Emacs because the project's policy requires copyright assignment.

-- Dmitry