Re: Drop the Copyright Assignment requirement for Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: address@hidden
> From: Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 9 May 2020 18:46:07 +0300
> 
> On 08.05.2020 21:54, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > After thinking about that for a while, I came to the sad conclusion
> > that I no longer understand what is the relation between GNU ELPA and
> > the Emacs project.
> 
> I've always considered GNU ELPA to be the "blessed" package repository 
> of Emacs. One where we have read the code of all packages and can 
> confirm that they don't do anything malicious and don't use proprietary 
> software. And aren't useless, I guess.

Why do we need to bless any package?  I can understand why the package
developers would want to be blessed, but why do _we_ want to do so?  I
could understand that effort being invested if we gain more packages
that could be pout in core or bundled with Emacs or even just being
optional dependencies in our code.  But waiving our basic requirements
makes sure these packages will _never_ be eligible, which makes this
effort not worth it.

> In any case, since we can't confirm the same of MELPA packages (at any 
> time the author of a given package could push out a new version with 
> some malicious payload inside; that's never happened, but still), we 
> can't recommend them to the same extent.

We don't _have_ to recommend anything.  People will use them or won't
use them regardless.