Re: Licence of ts-comint

[Jostein Kjønigsen]

Hey Jean.

Thanks for the email.

I'll be frank and admit I don't really care that much about licensing as long as software I use is open-source. That applies to stuff I write and maintain myself.

(Prepare for a slight rant)

With that said, I'm a bit put off by how much effort the FSF/GNU puts into copyright and licensing of code, as opposed ... the code itself.

The whole GCC AST thing and debate about the "freeness" of the AST lead to LLVM being made. For similar reasons, Emacs and GUD has for a long time not supported a Elf-3 capable debugger, because before GDB got that capability that would mean supporting LLDB, which would be "bad" (it not being GPL-licensed and all).

I've seen this quote on some forum online: "The FSF was formed to replace proprietary software with free software. Having succeeded, it now lives on to replace free software with free software".

It's obviously meant as a joke, but I hope you can see where that joke is coming from. Is this really where your effort is best spent?

And now this... I honestly find the churn the FSF is putting on its GPL licenses quite baffling.

If the GPL v1 was good enough for free software... Why on earth should the FSF develop and deploy a new license which renders all former GPLed code "incompatible" (as you put it)? I'm lost for words. Are there really anyone besides Richard M. Stallmann who condones this move?

If you now make the GPL-license incompatible not only with BSD or MIT-type licenses, but also the GPL license itself... Prepare to be even further berated next time the GPL vs BSD-license is up for debate in online forums. Why put so much effort into making license compliance so hard?

From the outside looking in, it looks like needlessly inconveniencing the very people who made stuff for your platform.

You're obviously free to do whatever you please, but to me this just seems a misguided. If your goal is to  promote free software, how do you see this helping?

(End of rant)

That said... My small and pretty insignificant package is already licensed "GPL 2 or whatever newer comes along".

If you still think this is "incompatible" and needs an upgrade, and if you are willing to do the leg-work... You know where my repo is. Feel free to issue a pull-request and I'll have it merged.

--

Yours truly

Jostein Kjønigsen

address@hidden 🍵 address@hidden

https://jostein.kjonigsen.net

On Sat, Aug 12, 2017, at 10:24 AM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

Hi,

In a thread in the emacs-devel maillist, the licensing situation for

emacs

packages provided through Emacs package archives has been under focus. I

have

volunteered to contact the authors of packages that have a license that

is

incompatible with Emacs, which is now under GPL-3+.

See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-07/msg01069.html

So I wonder if you could consider to change the license of your package

to

GPL-3+?

Also, you may have noticed that the package from which ts-comint is

forked has recently moved to GPL3+.

https://github.com/redguardtoo/js-comint/commit/eb4744122724b24e492c2171fff438e3ee2045a8

Yours,

Jean-Christophe Helary