Henning Makholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> I'm more concerned with pushing the ocaml.el discussion to a >> conclusion. > > One step on the way to a conclusion is to figure out whether the .el > files are derived from Emacs solely by virtue of using Emacs's APIs.
I've thought about this some more and come to two conclusions. First, Emacs doesn't really have APIs. It has LISP code, but there's no encapsulation or privacy there: everything is exposed and available to the user at run-time. gnus-article-wash-html is as much a part of the user interface as M-q. Skilled operators of Emacs make use of these functions all the time. Such methods of operation are not copyrightable. Second, this pretty clearly fits the definition of a derived work under the FSF's idea of the law, so we're stuck with that. Some more digging into Moglen's writing comes up with the following idea: dynamic linking is *not* enough to get the FSF to decide something's a derived work. Rather, they require the combination to be essentially one program. His text is, "If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program." In this case, it's not Emacs' copyright license which matters, but the copyright licenses (almost all GPL) for other libraries of elisp code. Data structures and callbacks happen among those, making the ocaml mode part of a single program. It must be distributed under the terms of the GPL. Sorry to have let the matter lie for so long. -Brian -- Brian Sniffen [EMAIL PROTECTED]