On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 02:30:42PM -0500, Peter S Galbraith wrote: You said: > > Anyways: it's legal for elisp code to have a GPL-incompatible license. > > However, it's not legal to distribute GPLed emacs with such code if that > > code is intended to be used with emacs to implement some program. > > If any non-trivial code makes a call to an Emacs function, even > say 'buffer-substring', then do we consider that loaded code a > GPL'ed library? I guess that's the question.
Hmm. I was under the impression that xemacs had a different license. However, the current xemacs is GPL'd. If there are no non-GPLed implementations of the interfaces used by the code, then, yeah, that's an issue. [I seem to remember something about tcl and elisp converging -- there might be an alternative license there. Then again, maybe not..] However, even if there are no non-GPLed implementations of the interfaces, a trivial call to buffer-substring would not be worth worrying about. If the code in question falls under fair use, copyright isn't an issue: you need something substantial enough to be considered a copyrightable work before copyright becomes an issue. -- Raul