Everyone who has contributed to the current instance has signed the paperwork, so as soon as we release a new version we can add ESS to ELPA.
> There has been a discussion about including ESS in GNU ELPA a while back
> [1] but apparently that effort has stalled due to the copyright
> paperwork.
> Maybe it should be added to NonGNU ELPA?
Actually, it stalled later, in 2020 for no good reason.
AFAIK the code was pretty much ready. In my mail archive it seems in the
last communication with Alex we were discussin details about a cleanup
patch to make ESS buildable "in the usual way" (rather than via ESS's
own makefile, and without breaking if julia-mode is not installed, or
something like that).
Maybe I just dropped the ball. Alex? Eric?
I also added Lionel in the Cc since `git log` suggests that he's doing
a fair bit of maintenance lately.
Stefan