Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup writes:
>
>  > But you can't.  There is no point in slapping a license on a
>  > distribution when you don't have standing to sue over license breaches
>  > since you are not holding copyright to any significant part of it.
>  > 
>  > It only weakens the GPL if you start creating situations where it cannot
>  > be taken seriously and/or enforced.
>
> I see.  So the widespread use of GPL in projects that don't collect
> assignments is another excuse to declare a piece of software an enemy
> of the movement.
>
> Seriously, I disagree.

Since I cannot even figure out what your strawman is supposed to refer
to, I am not sure what you disagree with.

>  > > OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice ... doesn't that undermine your point?
>  > 
>  > If you take a look at R.C.Weir venting off in the comment section
>  > of basically every publication delivering a LibreOffice release
>  > announcement, that "a little miffed" is not a mere hypothetical.
>
> Once again, if he's really venting about the license (and not about
> "who is the real successor to Sun OpenOffice.org"), that's crazy.

It's rather hard to tell what it is _supposed_ to be about.  But it is
not hard to see the license-originating asymmetry of the overall
situation as a driving factor.

> If Apache didn't want to enable one-way code flow, they wouldn't use a
> permissive license.

They are fine with one-way flow into proprietary products.  They tend to
be less than enthused about GPLed or LGPLed reuse.

It's like selling a donkey stallion of your own good breed to a mule
breeding farm and you find they mate him with donkeys rather than mares,
creating breeding donkeys competing with your own business.

In other terms: proprietary products don't compete with their community
and their ideas of freedom.

I understand what this is about, but it does demonstrate a sore spot of
the model.

> (Who is R.C.Weir, anyway?  I seem to recall a Grateful Dead guitarist
> by that name....)

I think he is something like the principal maintainer of Apache
OpenOffice or close to that, but I don't have all that much of a clue.

-- 
David Kastrup