[slime-devel] Slime distributed with GNU Emacs

[Helmut Eller]

* Matthew Mondor [2010-07-07 17:04] writes:

> 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.

I think ELPA (or whatever the name of the packaging system will be)
still requires copyright assignments to the FSF.  Almost certainly if
it's distributed by the FSF.

> 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?

Public Domain isn't a license.  It means that the material is not
copyrighted and no license is needed.

> 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?

It's probably not so easy to "change" the license of stuff that is
already in PD.  Since PD more or less means that there's no copyright
holder there's nobody who could give a license.

Also if the copyright (for the non PD parts) is assigned to the FSF they
would presumably change the license to GPL.

> 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?

Well, yes.  But it's almost the opposite of what we were doing until
now.  We essentially made 'cvs up' easy instead of making it easy to
stay with old/mismatched versions.  And as matter of fact, the 'cvs up'
approach worked damn well.

> 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...

Good point.

Helmut