Re: Drop the Copyright Assignment requirement for Emacs

[Richard Stallman]

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  > That was my impression initially too.  But in practice it evolved to
  > a place for the "not quite ready for prime-time" cases: i.e. we
  > let most everything in, provided they have copyright and adhere
  > to some minimal conventions.

That is a good point.

                                  So we don't uphold the same
  > standard there, never did, I think.

Not 100% of the technical conventions, I think -- but the exceptions,
the ones we don't insist on before putting the package in ELPA,
should be things that we know we can fix when someone has time to do it,
because all it takes is some work.

                                         Nowadays, I see ELPA as a
  > staging place for packages to come in, eventually make it into core
  > _and_ back into ELPA as :core packages.

It's ok to use it that way.

  > FWIW, I don't fully agree with Stefan: we should not require
  > copyright assignment for inclusion in GNU ELPA if that introduces
  > needless friction, but we should require of authors, maintainers or
  > proponents that they make an effort to track down the contributors
  > and solve this, otherwise it makes no sense for it to be there.

It would be unwise to put that sort of work off, because we can't do
it on our own.  Our doing work is not guaranteed to suffice.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)