Andreas Roehler writes: > The question already touched so far is, if or how copyright might > declared with respect to programs.
Sure, but that is entirely irrelevant to the assignment issue. The assignment policy takes current copyright law as given. So I don't think this is a useful conversation to have on python-mode or xemacs-beta at this time. Better gnu.misc.discuss or so. > That's why giving it free is ok and best. Then copyright is no > longer a danger. This is something that is relevant to python-mode, but not really to xemacs-beta, since XEmacs has no assignment policy and is unlikely to get one AFAICS. If you want a change in Emacs's policy, you'll need to do direct lobbying of the FSF officers and/or Emacs maintainers: xemacs-beta and python-mode have no power there. I will say that opinions diverge dramatically on the efficacy of various possible ways of "neutralizing" copyright. AFAICS the Emacs Project is not about to change its assignment policy. If you do not want to assign your work, you can dedicate it to the public domain, for example. But if you do not do something that allows the FSF control over derived code (ie, code written by others based on your code), AIUI it will not be possible for a merged package incorporating your contributions to be accepted into Emacs. I don't have a strong preference one way or the other; if you don't (or do!) want to assign, I'm not going to ask you to reconsider. But you should remember that failing to assign will inherently cause more work for you, and also may increase friction within your community. To mitigate that, I would be mildly pleased if you assigned your rights to any merger of python.el and python-mode.el to the FSF. _______________________________________________ Python-mode mailing list Python-mode@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-mode