The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[George Neuner]

On Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:16:25 +0100, dan at telent.net wrote:

>Ken Tilton wrote:
>> Kenny happened to solve the traveling 
>> salesman problem and protein-folding and passed the fricking Turing test 
>> by using add-42 wherever he needed 42 added to a number, and  RMS wants 
>> credit and ownership and control of it all. 
>
>That might be what RMS wants (or not, I've never asked him), but it 
>doesn't follow from the licence.  What follows from the licence is that 
>you have to distribute the derived work as GPL _or not at all_.  I 
>practice - if not in marketing terms - that's no more a land grab than a 
>proprietary licence saying "you can't use this to add your own numbers 
>to 42 at all and if you do we'll eat your brains".
>
>The other consideration is that, and notwitshtanding any text to the 
>contrary in the GPL, it's not actually up to the copyright holder to 
>define what "derived work" means: it's for the court to decide that. 
>Now, I don't want to imply that courts are rational animals that can be 
>relied on to understand all the issues in technical cases like this (ha, 
>I slay myself) but really, if there's a reasonable concern that an 
>implementation of the major advances in computer science you describe 
>are legally derivative of someone's function that adds 42 to its 
>argument, your legal system is fucked.  Redo from start.

Our [US] legal system is fucked ... more so with respect to patents,
but copyrights aren't far behind.  The US Congress just revisited
patent law to make it less of a land grab - we'll have to wait and see
how the USPTO interprets the new rules - but copyright law has been
trending the other way (more grabbing) for a couple of decades now.

George
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