Re: enable MELPA & Marmalade by defaul [was: mykie.el]

[Stephen Berman]

On Tue, 07 Jan 2014 15:41:28 +0100 Grim Schjetne <address@hidden> wrote:

> Drew Adams <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> And anyway, nothing says that those repositories involve much
>> non-free software, or even any at all.
>
> I viewed a random package in Marmalade and it had no indication of a
> license whatsoever. Perhaps the author intended to release it as free
> software or could easily be convinced to do so, but as it stands now,
> Marmalade is not completely free software.
>
>> Without looking, I'd bet that the *overwhelming mass* of packages
>> in those two repositories are free software (GPL'd).  Why make
>> users jump through extra hoops to access all that free software,
>> even if there might also be a non-free package there somewhere?
>>
>> Do you think that a downloading user cannot tell whether some
>> software is free or not?  If so, is this about trying to hide
>> that non-free software from their unsuspecting hands, so they
>> cannot make the awful mistake of not recognizing it?
>
> It seems like a reasonable assumption that the overwhelming mass is
> licensed under the GPL, but I absolutely do think a user cannot tell
> whether an unlabelled package is free or not, at least I can't, not
> without consulting the author.

Is it even "legal" to distribute any elisp code that is not at least
compatible with the GPL?  After all, any elisp code will have to link
with Emacs to be usable.

Steve Berman