Re: VM and the FSF

[Paul D. Smith]

%% cmclist@swbell.net (Christopher Mark Conn) writes:

  cmc> What I'm interested in is... why VM (which I consider
  cmc> to be a wonderful mail program) is not listed on the
  cmc> GNU software page.

Likely because no one ever applied to make it so.

  cmc> One issue might be that we require copyright assignment (to the
  cmc> FSF) from any code that goes into the core of GNU Emacs, so that
  cmc> defending the GPL of Emacs is easier.

This isn't strictly true, though; there are other packages in GNU Emacs
core which aren't copyright by the FSF.  At least, there were the last
time I looked, in 20.5 or thereabouts.

Certainly any C code or patches to FSF copyright elisp must be assigned,
and certainly the FSF would greatly prefer assignment, but it's not 100%
mandatory in some cases.

  cmc> Perhaps we were unable to get copyright assignments on VM.

I do know there's not a snowball's chance in hell that Kyle will _ever_
assign copyright of VM to the FSF.

I think it's a confluence of mutual indifference: RMS likes RMAIL, Kyle
likes XEmacs and doesn't use Emacs anyway (until just a week or two ago,
there had never been a version of VM that officially worked on a version
of Emacs later than Emacs 19.34) and he isn't interested in changing any
part of VM to make it more "acceptable" to the Emacs core.

This is all my opinion and hearsay :).

-- 
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 Paul D. Smith <psmith@baynetworks.com>         Network Management Development
 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
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   These are my opinions---Nortel Networks takes no responsibility for them.