Re: Drop the Copyright Assignment requirement for Emacs

[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. ]]]

  > If people working for those companies or in activities involving such
  > hardware/software, say in some hospital, and would like to use Emacs (or
  > other GNU software) to develop possibly but non-necessary free or "open
  > source" applications to work with/alongside non-free what should they
  > do?

What they should do is, not use GNU discussion lists to promote the use
of those nonfree programs.

Regarding the putative free programs they might perhaps be developing,
there may be some GNU discussion list where it is pertinent to discuss
them.  Especially if they are GNU packages.

But not here -- this list is for developing GNU Emacs.  Those other
free programs may be entirely admirable, but discussing them here is
off topic, aside from special cases.

BTW, the words "free or 'open source'" could reinforce a widespread
confusion.  It appears that most people in computing think that "free"
and "open source" are disjoint.  On the contrary, nearly all free
programs are open source, and most open source programs are free.  See
https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html and
https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.

        Isn't it unnecessary hard on them to not be able to talk about
  > non-free software?

For mailing lists to have specified topics is normal and necessary.
I am sure they can learn to live with that.

                       Isn't it also a limitation on GNU software itself if
  > it can't be used in such cases as well as further inclination for
  > development of non-free software?

Golly, what a misunderstanding.  These rules are about GNU mailing
lists, not about using your MUA (whichever one that may be).

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)