Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> [[[ 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. ]]]
>
>   > It has been a while since I last read through the FSF GPL FAQs on this, 
>   > so maybe copyright has been weakened, but I thought that dynamic linking 
>   > does not avoid the GPL.
>
> Our position is that dynamic linking makes a combination covered by
> the GPL -- provided the code _as distributed_ is designed for linking
> the parts together.
>
> Combinations that the user decides to make, which are not prearranged
> by code that gets distributed, are not limited by the GPL.  This is
> true regardless of how the parts get linked.
>
>   > Could Emacs require plugins to state compliance with the GPL in order to 
>   > be loaded, like GCC requires?
>
> If Emacs supports plug-ins, it should definitely handle this as GCC does.

If our only option to combine Emacs and GCC is to implement this in a
manner where neither GCC nor Emacs can be considered a separate
application any more, then we won't be combining Emacs and GCC.

Copyright can be made to cover extensibility.  But it will stop at
interoperability of preexisting applications.

-- 
David Kastrup