Re: feedmail.el in the public domain?

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> why would we want or need to waste our energy on
> this?  This file has been in Emacs since about forever, and it never
> bothered us that it was in PD.  Why now?

Because it's come to our attention now, it's an easy fix, and getting licenses 
right is an important part of the GNU project's work.

> > If a file is in the public domain then there is no legal obstacle to placing 
> > whatever copyright license you like on a copy that you redistribute....
>
> Maybe so (IANAL)

I'm not a lawyer either, but this is a well-understood part of copyright law 
there's no real controversy about it. We've used public-domain code in the GNU 
project before, with no problems.