Re: Drop the Copyright Assignment requirement for Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> 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?

I don't see any particular difficulty: just don't promote the
proprietary software with which you need to work.

Very often, you can mention its name without it being a promotion.
Very often for the situations you talk a bout the software is
sufficiently special-purposed that the name is both harmless and useless
(harmless because mentioning it won't cause other people to try it out
because they don't have the necessary equipment anyway, and useless
because the probability that someone knows that software and reads your
post is fairly low).

And in case of doubt, you can skip the name (replace it with "that
damned proprietary software" ;-)

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

Presumably they don't want to talk about that non-Free software but
about the Free software that they are writing (and about the format of
the data it has to manipulate: whether that data comes from or goes to
a program that's proprietary or not is rather irrelevant).

> 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?

I don't think there is such a limitation.


        Stefan