Re: future of quail
David Kastrup writes:
It's about the situation that the FSF saw itself to be in with
regard to
Lucid Emacs code: because of their own copyright assignment policies,
they were quite unable to fold back changes by people with different
views and standards.
Indeed it is exactly that kind of hypocrisy that I find most
distasteful about FSF-ism. A project uses a modified BSD license,
which the FSF takes advantage of to incorporate in a GPLed project,
making it *illegal* for the original project to use GPLed improvements
unless they make a *permanent* change in their licensing.
This is very different from the situation of Emacs vis-a-vis XEmacs,
where (a) Emacs can legally make an exception for any piece of code it
likes without changing either its license or its normal assignment
policy, and (b) much XEmacs code is in any case owned by the FSF (eg,
all XEmacs code I've authored is), but the FSF is unwilling to do a
little research to find out whether a particular desirable feature is
already owned by the FSF, or could easily be acquired. In many cases
10 minutes with "$VCS annotate" would be sufficient to determine
whether it's worth following up to authors for confirmation and/or
additional assignments.
Nevertheless, incorporating BSD-licensed content in a GPL project is
not infringement, and AFAICS not unethical, merely uncooperative.
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