Re: feedmail.el in the public domain?

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > No, IIUC it just means that their header notices shouldn't say public
  > domain because, while the original version may have been PD, the current
  > version is inevitably covered by the copyright of the FSF because of all
  > the changes we've accumulated on them since they were incorporated
  > into Emacs.

That is true IF we have made substantial changes.
But if we have not made much change, then the file is still in
the public domain.  We should check the facts, not just presume.

  > And for that same reason, we need to distribute them under a license we
  > find acceptable: it could be CC0 (to try and mimick PD as much as
  > possible), or GPLv3+ (like all our other files).

Unless the GNU Project has some special reason to avoid using
copyleft, we should release such files under GPLv3+.  See
https://gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)