Richard Stallman Pushing for GPL3, Kick Out Free Software from Free Software Platform (2017-08)

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

here's a quick story.

This is a sinister move, because:

When you look from this perspective, something is wrong. FSF-free software are being kicked out from free software platform the MELPA.

why? because they want to conform to rms's idiosyncrasy, so that, perhaps, the whole emacs community will grow and benefit. That is, packages on MELPA could potentially more easily move into GNU emacs (the reality is more complicated, because FSF still requires you to sign papers to transfer the ownership of your software to FSF)

but rms is the single most damage to emacs in the past 5 years, not just political issues, but purely technical issues, because he's totally out of touch.

what should have been done is to get rid of rms.


Note: MELPA is a emacs package repository. [https://melpa.org/] It is started in 2013 by Donald Ephraim Curtis (aka milkypostman. website at http://milkbox.net/)

MELPA is not Richard Stallman's project. It is not part of FSF/GNU.

emacs packages growth 2015-07-28
emacs packages growth . by Artur Malabarba. 〔image source http://malabarba.github.io/emacs-archive-tracker/

As for my packages, i decided to yield and switch from GPL2 to GPL3. Thanks to Jean-Christophe Helary (brandelune) and George Jones @eludom for the chat. https://github.com/xahlee/xah-math-input/issues/1#issuecomment-323527370

Reference

rms's passive dictatorship:

richard stallman email gpl melpa 2017-07-29 gcttk
Richard Stallman email gpl melpa 2017-07-29 https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-07/msg01069.html
melpa gpl remove 2017 08-18 56m5q
MELPA decision to remove non-GPL3 packages https://github.com/melpa/melpa/commit/c3366117f3399660509f62849a88dc8be56a1fef