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Subject: XEmacs FSF Copyright Assignment Policy (was Re: ps-print: zebra-stripes vs line-numbers)
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From: "Crazy Eddie" <steve@xemacs.org>
In-Reply-To: Hrvoje Niksic's message of 16 May 1997 08:03:53 +0200
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Date: 15 May 1997 23:53:04 -0700
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Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:

> Steven L Baur <steve@calag.com> writes:
>> juno kampstra <juka@cayennesoft.nl> writes:
>> 
>> > PS  cc also to me personal
>> > PS2 are people intrested in my edited ps-print?
>> 
>> Only if you sign FSF copyright assignment papers for your patches (or
>> you already have signed the assign.future assignment).

> What is our current policy on this?  One way or the other, we should
> document it somewhere!

I agree.

I'm going to take the liberty of responding on list about this, since
there have been other inquiries.

First, Juno agreed within minutes of that posting to sign all the
relevant papers, so case closed on this particular case.

The current policy is that in the general case, I am respectfully
requesting that all those who submit patches to the XEmacs source
sign the FSF copyright assignment *for the patches*.  The assignment
papers are available at
	ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/beta/FSF/
Due to the massive amount of currently-tied-up-by-Sun-Microsystems
code that I have no intention of having rewritten I cannot reasonably
reject patches for non-copyright assignment, so I haven't.

For full packages, copyright assignment is fully up to the
maintainer.  With the migration towards plug-n-play XEmacs I see
external packages as being little threat to the GPL wrt XEmacs.

ps-print.el is one of the special cases.  I was Cc'ed in the
discussion between the current maintainer (Jacques Duthen) and
RMS during the integration of XEmacs changes into the `official'
version.  I won't comment further about that exchange, other than
I am willing to go a long ways to spare Jacques further grief
because he went way out of his way to accomodate XEmacs, he is a
talented programmer and I do not wish to be an accomplice in
having him abandon Emacs development altogether.

I haven't completely made up my mind on this matter -- I still want to
`save the world' and get XEmacs FSF copyright assigned, I am
appreciative of the reasons why this may not be desirable.  In any
event, I believe the individual package authors must be respected as
to their wishes.  Gnus is FSF copyright assigned; if you make patches
to it you should sign the copyright assignment papers.  VM is not and 
it doesn't matter either way.

I expect to have some of this clarified when we get to the task of
defining `core' XEmacs, that is, the primary part of XEmacs maintained
by people on this list.  Any patches to code that doesn't have an
identified maintainer/contact point, is synched with GNU Emacs
sources, and is expected to be synched manually by whomever is doing
the lisp synching should be copyright assigned out of self-defense.

`External' code that doesn't have a maintainer and isn't synched
with Emacs will be dropped, also out of self-defense (that currently
includes the version control lisp stuff btw).
-- 
steve@calag.com baur
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