Re: [V] New package: ASN1
On 5 Jun 2002, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Josefsson
<jas(a)extundo.com> writes:
Simon> Isn't it the same thing as non-free Debian packages?
No, it's not. Elisp files are _part of Emacs_ when you write a mode.
They will interact with all the GPL code that already is part of
Emacs, calling out to it, providing hooks to be called from it. You
just can't argue that Emacs is functioning only as a Lisp language
translator here, an analogy to GCC. It is also using the "editor
library", which is analogous to glibc---which is _not_ GPL, as you may
recall, it is LGPL precisely so that non-free apps can link with it.
By this argument Debian should not distribute the ASN1 mode as a Debian
package either? They currently do. It is even distributed in the "free"
category.
I have CCed the debian maintainer of the asn1-mode package. Do you
remember if the license was discussed?
Richard, if you can provide some guidance on how to resolve this, it would
be very useful. The core of the problem seem to be if it should be
possible to write non-GPL Emacs Lisp code at all. Much like it is
possible to write non-GPL code using Bash, GCC-specific C, Guile, Python
and other GPLd programming languages, I think it should be possible to
write non-GPL Emacs Lisp, but that's just my opinion.