vm team mailing list archive

[Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Tami, Thanks for your keen interest.  Noah Friedman is of course
well-known to us.

Kyle Jones issued VM under GPL.  So, it can be freely redistributed.
However, FSF has a policy of distributing only software for which it
owns the copyright.  So, they don't include it in Gnu Emacs.  If they
would like to distribute it, there is nothing stopping them.
Likewise, there is nothing stopping Kyle Jones from assigning
copyright to FSF.

The reference 15 on the Wikipedia page of Emacs gives more details of
the discussion

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs

It would be ideal if Kyle Jones can assign his copyright to the FSF.
The rest of us are quite happy to do so as well.  But, Kyle Jones
hasn't been heard from since 2007.  If either Noah or you can reach
him and persuade him, we would be quite grateful.

Cheers,
Uday



Tami writes:

> On 2010 May 25 Uday S Reddy wrote:
> 
> [brevitized]
> 
> > VM is not included in Gnu Emacs distribution due to copyright issues, but it
> > is included in XEmacs, Debian, Fedora and FreeBSD distributions.  However,
> > these distributions would be a couple of versions behind.  Go to the VM home
> > page for the latest stable releases.
> 
> > Uday Reddy
> > (VM Development Team)
> 
> I am curious what the copyright issues are.  My son, Noah Friedman introduced
> me to VM in 1990 and I have never used anything else.  We both used VM on the
> AI GNU lab and FSF Distribution Office machines. rms never objected.
> 
> In fact, sometime after I left Boston there was a prior-art controversy
> regarding VM that was settled quickly when GNU backups showed its use on our
> system before the disputed date.
> 
> It's clearly Software Libre or rms would have been very unhappy at us.
> 
> Is there any way to get it included with Gnu Emacs?  Or is it just one of those
> personality 'differences' best left alone?
> 
> Thanks for the new version information!
> 
> .Tami
>  .signature: syntax error at line 1: `(' unexpected
> 
>