Re: Why are so many great packages not trying to get included in GNU Emacs?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Kévin Le Gouguec <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 07 May 2020 11:40:52 +0200
> Cc: Yuan Fu <address@hidden>, Richard Stallman <address@hidden>,
>  Eric Abrahamsen <address@hidden>,
>  Emacs developers <address@hidden>,
>  Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>,
>  Phillip Lord <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> 
> The best assessment of copyright assignment effectiveness I know of is
> Bradley Kuhn's recap of the issue in 2012[1]:
> 
> > Simply put, the GPL violation defending lawyers have gotten more
> > obsessed than ever with delay tactics. They try to raise every
> > spurious issue they can think of to delay you, distract you, or
> > otherwise try to avoid bringing their client into compliance with the
> > terms of GPL.  If you don't hold all the copyrights, they'll focus on
> > that issue.  For example, I had an executive of a large computer maker
> > tell me that his lawyers say "copyright infringement claims are
> > legally invalid unless you hold a majority of the copyrights".  This
> > is completely asinine and clearly incorrect in the USA, but violators
> > make these arguments all the time.  As another example: I was once
> > deposed in a court case for 8 hours about the topic whether or not
> > BusyBox's configuration files magically made Erik Andersen's
> > copyrights fail to appear in the binary work.  That's a spurious
> > argument that I spent 8 hours refuting, yet the violator's lawyer
> > again brought it up in the Court as a defense that we had to refute.
> 
> To me that sort of suggests that copyright assignment is neither
> sufficient (you still need enough resources to overcome "every spurious
> issue" the defending lawyers will throw at you) nor necessary (since
> Bradley considers it "asinine" to say "an infringement claim is invalid
> without holding a majority of the copyrights").

Actually, Bradley's conclusion, the very next paragraph after the one
you quoted, is a direct opposite of yours, AFAICT.  If we are going to
cite others who might have educated opinions on this matter, why not
cite them more completely?