Re: Adding advisory notification for non-ELPA package.el downloads

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Paul Rankin <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2017 22:29:28 +1000
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> All of this is based on the assumption that people *want* to assign
> their copyright to FSF. This is not the case. I develop a couple of
> packages and I would never assign my copyright. Copyright isn't just
> some legal nuisance, to many people it's something pretty sacred. It's a
> stamp that says "I made this, I contributed this to the world." The
> notion that I should be "reminded" or "educated" that in developing
> Emacs packages that my goal should be to assign my copyright to FSF is
> beyond insulting.

I think you might misunderstand the nature and the essence of the
copyright assignment: it doesn't in any way diminish the author's
rights on his/her code.  Here's a direct citation from

 https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2014/spring/copyright-assignment-at-the-fsf

  Sometimes contributors are concerned about giving up rights to their
  work. As the assignment is a gift to the free software community,
  they don't want it to come at the expense of having flexibility in
  the use of their own code. Thus, we grant back to contributors a
  license to use their work as they see fit. This means they are free
  to modify, share, and sublicense their own work under terms of their
  choice. This enables contributors to redistribute their work under
  another free software license. While this technically also permits
  distributing their work under a proprietary license, we hope they
  won't.

I can confirm that every one of my assignments I got back signed by
the FSF includes a specific clause about the above rights granted back
to me.

I suggest a reading of that page, it has additional useful
information.