Re: On Contributing To Emacs

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>  Blame the
> ridiculous software copyright issues and large corporations that are
> behind those, and also dishonest people and companies which use free
> software without making their code freely available.

FWIW, I fully and completely agree with the general sentiment here.

It is this unjust, immoral and pernicious situation that forces us to
use copy-left to begin with.  In a reasonable system, there would be no
need to use licenses to protect our rights.

> Saying "it's a shame" that assignment process is needed and is in some
> cases legally complicated is like blaming the traffic lights for
> turning red at times.  It's not the traffic light that should be
> blamed, it's the chaos that would ensue if the traffic laws were not
> in place and enforced.

The copyright assignment requirement is not forced on us by external
factors.  With few exceptions, the rest of the free software world lives
happily without it.  Emacs *choose* to use it in the hope that it will
give some legal advantages in a future GPL violation case.

Whether or not that will be needed in such a trial is anybody's guess
(including the FSF lawyers, BTW, so they keep insisting) but I note that
there are several GPL violation cases that have been quite successful
without it.

Glibc and GCC have recently moved to use a DCO instead.  I think we
should follow their lead:

https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Contribution%20checklist#Copyright_and_license