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From: | Akira Kyle |
Subject: | Re: Rethinking the design of xwidgets |
Date: | Wed, 14 Oct 2020 00:36:12 -0600 |
User-agent: | mu4e 1.4.13; emacs 28.0.50 |
On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 10:38 PM, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> That leads me to my following proposal to rethink the design > of > xwidgets. Given that Emacs now has support for dynamic > modules and > it is now enabled by default, I propose exposing an > interface for > dynamic modules to define custom xwidgets.I think that is a good idea. However, before we develop that, we should recheck our defenses against nonfree dynamic modules. Are they strong enough?
There is the GPL compatibility symbol (plugin_is_GPL_compatible) that must be exported in order for Emacs to load a dynamic module. I'm not a lawyer but I'd say there's no way someone could claim in a court that they weren't willfully violating the GPL if they wrote a nonfree dynamic module as they'd have to explicitly include such a symbol in their code and it would be literally written into the compiled library. I suppose the dynamic module documentation and header file (emacs-module.h) could have more explicit text explaining the purpose of that symbol and why a dynamic module must be GPL compatible. Beyond that, I can't think of anything further to protect against nonfree dynamic modules.
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