GPL v2 only,please

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

SL Baur writes:

 > I wish all my contributions to XEmacs to be considered
 > under the GPL V2 only.  I do not like Richard Stallman, I
 > do not like the politics he plays against us and others, but
 > I do like the GPL V2.  Unless someone can convince me
 > otherwise, all of my contributions to XEmacs are to be
 > considered GPL V2 only.

Unfortunately, if you insist on those licensing terms, we would have
to change the licensing of the rest of XEmacs to GPLv2-only, since
XEmacs is licensed as a whole.  I will ask my lawyer, but that's my
best guess as to what he'll say.  While licensing XEmacs as GPLv2-
only may be desirable, it's not a decision to be taken lightly---and
AFAICS your contributions will have to sit in limbo until we do take
the decision.

I'm very sorry.  I strongly sympathize with the "I don' need no
steenkin' GPLv3, gimme a GPLv2.01" position[1], but the reality is that
XEmacs is a GNU Emacs derivative, most users want it to stay that way,
and the FSF will likely enforce GPLv3 on Emacs pretty much as soon as
it's published.

As a practical matter, I believe (after some thought on the matter) it
doesn't much matter how much GPLv3 sucks, we can live with it.
Specifically, most of the 3rd party software we link to is either GNU
software or permissively licensed, and those that aren't are unlikely
to be willing to give up their largest body of client software.


Footnotes: 
[1]  At least until we see how the anti-patent and anti-DRM provisions
play out both in court and in corporate contributions to open source.