James Carlson wrote: > > A deeper question is the value of integrating something that we know > from the outset will be essentially a frozen snapshot dust collector > due to Sun's internal legal issues. Wouldn't it be better to have > someone outside of Sun who isn't afraid of GPLv3 do the work? >
The technical work is largely done, so I would suggest that another way to tackle this issue is to integrate what I've done, and allow someone outside of Sun to take it over if needed. Emacs is a pretty mature package (well over 20 years old), and is not evolving so fast that old copies are worthless. The value of having something from the last couple of years available by default is pretty high. I've been using a 7 year old copy out of /usr/dist, and it was workable, if not ideal (so much so that I never bothered to build a fresh emacs for myself while at Sun, until this project). Finally, as more and more software becomes GPLv3, we are going to face this issue on multiple fronts, and some answer will have to be found. Whatever that answer is, our emacs packages can adapt to it. In the interim, there are worse things than having some version available. - Ali
