Re: ILISP License Status.

> From: Matthias Koeppe <[email protected]>
> Sender: [email protected]
> X-Original-Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:15:53 +0200
> Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:15:53 +0200
> 
> Daniel Barlow <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > Looking at the existing COPYING file (primarily the "Any work
> > distributed or published ..." clause) it seems to me that GPL would be
> > a closer match for the terms there than LGPL, for what that's worth.
> > But I also note the bit where it says -
> >
> > | ILISP if freely redistributable. Eventually it may become part of GNU
> > | Emacs and it will in that case comply with the GPL.
> >
> > Perhaps you could get the Emacs people to include it in Emacs so that
> > it automatically gets relicensed? :-)
> 
> Getting it into GNU Emacs (as distributed by the FSF) would be hard,
> because the FSF would want legal papers from every contributor.

Yep.  That was the main issue.  I have some vary old mail from RMS on
the very subject.

> (That
> would be more work than for simply changing the license.)  But doesn't
> XEmacs count as a version of GNU Emacs?  Isn't ILISP already part of
> XEmacs?  So maybe it *has* already got relicensed automatically, and
> we just didn't notice ;)

Well. Maybe :)

> 
> Seriously, since the COPYING file says that ILISP may change to GPL at
> some time, I can't imagine why a contributor would object when we make
> that license change.

The "may change to GPL" paragraph was added by me and Rick Campbell
when we took over ILISP many years ago.  Maybe previous authors won't
mind.  I am just assuming that a "silence=assent" policy is the best
that can be done at this time.

Hence my proposal.

Cheers

PS. I am proposing LGPL since it seem to irk less people out there.

-- 
Marco Antoniotti ========================================================
NYU Courant Bioinformatics Group        tel. +1 - 212 - 998 3488
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