Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual

David Kastrup wrote: Mine, I guess. Just to note, I'm not particularly familiar with all this stuff, so take it lightly, please. I'm just on that ``common sense'' ground. I fail to see much similarity, but feel free to elaborate. I cannot understand what exactly you think about contributions without signed papers. Let's try to filter it out (again, I'm basing on my common sense and little knowledge of copyright law, so, please, be kind to my mistakes.) So, let's assume John contributes a large patch (500 lines of code) to XEmacs. Since we are talking of XEmacs here, he is not asked for any copyright assignments or other legal papers. Now, what is the legal status of XEmacs + John's patch now? (We assume XEmacs is legally distributed under GNU GPL before the patch is added.) I'm listing all possibilities I can think of. Possibility 1. John's patch is automagically licensed under GNU GPL and ``license control'' is miraculously transferred to some mistical ``XEmacs spirit,'' that can change the license at whim, like FSF could if it wasn't bound by our assignment papers. This doesn't sound real. Possibility 2. John's patch is automagically licensed under GNU GPL, but to relicense it, you need his blessing. This is what I guessed in the previous message based on XEmacs as a whole being distributed under GNU GPL. However, you wrote that John's code couldn't be licensed implicitly: ``To have software GPLed, you need to explicitly licence it that way, regardless of whether it has come in contact with other GPLed software or not.'' What does ``explicitly'' means, BTW? I'm distributing a program I wrote, with each file saying it comes under GPL and the GPL text in `COPYING'. Is this explicit enough? Should John distribute his patch and GPL text along with it to make it explicit? Or is signing legal papers the only option? What is the difference between licensing done by the project original author and its contributors in terms of licensing? Possibility 3. John's patch is not licensed at all, because he didn't explictly license it. However, to the best of my knowledge of copyright law, you cannot even _use_ non-licensed work, not to mention modify or distribute it. This means that XEmacs people cannot legally merge John's patch in. In other words, XEmacs + John's patch combination is illegal to use, modify or distribute... Possibility 4. John loses the copyright on his contribution. That would solve the problem, but placing something in public domain is the decision of the author, so implicit lossage of copyright sounds way less realistic than implicit licensing. Besides, some of XEmacs files do carry other than FSF's copyrights. Possibility 5. XEmacs does require some sort of explicit licensing of contributions. Again, that would solve all problems, but from what I've heard here, this is simply not the case. So, to summarize, if my reasoning is correct, there are only two options left. Either XEmacs is distributed under GNU GPL, because each contributor implicitly (and some of them explicitly, by assigning copyright to FSF) licensed it under that license. Or XEmacs is used, distributed and modified illegally, because some parts of it are not licensed by copyright holders in any way. This means that people working on XEmacs, as well as distributors and even common users can be sued for copyright infringement (or how do they call it.) I personally don't feel easy about the second option. I'd like to be convinced that either the first or a third (missed here) option is true. Paul Pogonyshev