Re: How to distribute dynamic modules by themselves?

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ 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. ]]]

  > I wrote a dynamic module that exposes a simple interface for
  > Xapian, the indexing and searching engine. It could be very useful
  > for indexing thousands of files and search in them. I use this
  > module for my note-searching package.

This could be a useful thing, but before we decide to install it, we
need to check some crucial nontechnical issues.

* The moral issues.
Does Xapian include any nonfree software?
Does it depend on the presence of any nonfree software?

Does Xapian use some web service?

* The legal issues.
Assuming Xapian does everything with free software,
is all that software under GPL-compatible licenses?
If not, we need to look at how the non-GPL-compatible
software connects with the GPL-covered body of
Emacs and its add-ons.  Depending on that, it might be ok.

See https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html to check
whether a license is free, and whether it is GPL-compatible.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)