[slime-devel] Slime distributed with GNU Emacs

[Matthew Mondor]

On Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:44:59 +0800
Tobias C Rittweiler <tcr at freebits.de> wrote:

> 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.

Although I have no authority on SLIME whatsoever, I think that it never
was much trouble to install and get SLIME working even if it wasn't
shipped with Emacs.  If their future package format makes that even
easier, that's for the best...

As for the license, other than all the required work to transfer
copyright, isn't PD generally a better license for SWANK?
While transfering copyright to the FSF would add many restrictions.
If PD turns out to be a problem for a few countries, then wouldn't an
MIT-style license fix this while restricting as few as possible the
code?

Alternatively, if SLIME were GPL and included in Emacs in the future,
and the network protocol between SLIME and SWANK are well defined, it
probably would not be too much of a problem to keep SWANK under a less
restrictive license and to distribute it separately?

A potential problem I can see with SWANK under an FSF license would be
that it's the part that needs to be embedded with languages and/or
projects the most.  As for SLIME, if it's used exclusively with Emacs
it's probably not an issue at all...

Thanks,
-- 
Matt