[slime-devel] Slime distributed with GNU Emacs

[Tobias C Rittweiler]

Some people were contacted by one of the current
GNU Emacs maintainers and requested to assign
copyright to the FSF in order to allow Slime
be distributed with GNU Emacs.

I'm still having mail server issues (seems like I'm
only able to send mail on full moon), and hence could
not participate in a short internal roundabout mail
between Luke and Helmut.

Helmut rightly said that the matter should be discussed
on the mailing list anyway.

So below follows undelivered mail, and represent my thoughts
right after having read about the request.


Seems futile to me. Too many contributors over the time.
Will the SWANK side not be included? (Then how is that 
supposed to be distributed?)

SWANK is actually PD, not GPL. There's this saying that Germans
(and maybe Austrians, too?) cannot legally give up their copyright
and hence cannot actually release stuff in public domain. So the
situation of the SWANK side is pretty muddy to begin with.

Supposing all these legal matters get sorted out, and someone of
the FSF actually does all the legal work and gets the necessary
assignments (an Heracles job in my eyes), and Slime becomes
part of Emacs, then there's still the issue how future contributions
are supposed to be dealt with and whether need for assignment may be
regarded as an obstacle for contribution. OTOH, I don't see
major contribution happening.

And then yet another issue is synchronization between a Slime
development tree, and the putative Slime Emacs tree; no one has
so far stepped up who actually wants to take care of regular
releases of Slime which then may become a prerequisite of some
sort.

In short: too much hassle for too little gain. On the other hand,
it's not really my hassle, so I don't really object to the idea.

I think there's a new packaging system being developed for Emacs
for third-party contributions. It strikes me that may a better
fit for Slime.

  -T.