Re: emacs minor mode

[David Kastrup]

Florian Knupfer <address@hidden> writes:

> Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Florian Knupfer writes:
>>
>>> I've written a minor mode for Lilypond and emacs which I would like
>>> to contribute.
>>
>>> It can be retrieved at:
>>> https://github.com/knupfer/lilypond-pretty-print
>>
>> This is very nice!
>>
>>> I'm not experienced as a programmer and appreciate very much ideas
>>> to improve this mode and my skills.
>>
>> Are you using the LilyPond mode that we distribute; would you want to
>> take a look at improving that?
>>
>> Greetings, Jan
>
> I'm using it, but not very frequent.  I'm a music student and engrave
> from time to time my compositions.
>
> I'll look at it, but improving is somewhat subjective.  In my eyes, it
> would be an improvement to integrate this mode into lilypond mode
> deactivated by default, but some would perhaps disagree.  I think I'll
> look into the getbeat function which is especially bogus on new voices
> and tuples and perhaps an indicator in the mode-line for the current
> measure.
>
> What do you think?  More features or only making the existing better?
> And would it be necessary to sign a FSF agreement?

At the current point of time, we are distributing LilyPond-mode
ourselves.  There is no FSF agreement necessary for that.  Ultimately it
might be nice to provide LilyPond-mode additionally via ELPA which has,
I think, copyright-assigned packages.

However, there has been no effort at all that I know of getting
lilypond-mode into copyright-assigned state, and it would not even help
signing a copyright assignment form for Emacs contributions in general
because that can only cover code contributed by its authors to Emacs,
not code that somebody else grabbed from somewhere and chose to stick
into Emacs all on his own initiative.

And currently our LilyPond repositories are "somewhere" with regard to
"copyright FSF".  Since LilyPond itself is not copyright-assigned,
I doubt that the FSF would hand copyright assignment papers for LilyPond
proper.

So while putting Lilypond-mode into ELPA eventually would be desirable,
and while it will require copyright assignments to do so, I don't see
that there is anything that current contributors to lilypond-mode could
do to facilitate that at some later point of time.  If you say "I'll
never be willing or able to sign a copyright assignment to the FSF for
that work", that might be a reason to prefer looking for other
contributors in order to keep options open in future.

But if we wanted to be really serious about this we would have to
approach the FSF and ask them to let LilyPond or at least lilypond-mode
count among the copyright-assignable projects (it's work and
responsibility for them as well), and then try to round up all previous
contributors to lilypond-mode and get them to do the paperwork.

I don't see that happening soon.

-- 
David Kastrup