On 3/6/2026 12:43 PM, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
Jim Porter <[email protected]> writes:
Since the GPL uses copyright law as a way of guaranteeing the four
freedoms, the inclusion of legally-significant amounts of public domain
work would undermine this. Any public domain code could be relicensed
under a more-permissive license like BSD, or even extracted and used in
proprietary software.
No, public domain code cannot be re-licensed. It is already public
domain. You cannot put restrictions. The other question is whether it
can spoil GPL license of the *other parts of the code*. But that
question is to be answered by lawyers (GNU is on it).
Sorry, I phrased that poorly. The situation I was imagining was that
other projects could take any public domain code contained in a GNU
project, edit it, and release those changes under any license they like.
For small amounts of public domain code, this isn't a big deal, but it
becomes a problem if there's a lot of it.
In any case, I'd honestly prefer to spend my time mentoring any
potential contributors who don't feel their Lisp skills are up to the
task of writing a patch. I'm no expert on org-babel, but if anyone has
any Eshell patches in mind, I'd be happy to provide guidance, including
pair programming. (Time permitting, of course.)
