Re: Bug#118427: TP: epo -- Miner mode to reduce the labour to edit code

[Peter S Galbraith <GalbraithP@dfo-mpo.gc.ca>]

Raul Miller wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 02:30:42PM -0500, Peter S Galbraith wrote:
> 
> > If any non-trivial code makes a call to an Emacs function, even
> > say 'buffer-substring', then do we consider that loaded code a
> > GPL'ed library?  I guess that's the question.
> 
> Hmm. I was under the impression that xemacs had a different license.
> However, the current xemacs is GPL'd.
> 
> If there are no non-GPLed implementations of the interfaces used by the
> code, then, yeah, that's an issue. 

That's what I thought.

> However, even if there are no non-GPLed implementations of the interfaces,
> a trivial call to buffer-substring would not be worth worrying about.
> If the code in question falls under fair use, copyright isn't an issue:
> you need something substantial enough to be considered a copyrightable
> work before copyright becomes an issue.

This is why I picked something like buffer-substring.  It has
more than a handful of source code in C (50 lines or so, counting
calls to other routines), which makes it copyrightable.

If not, where's the line?  A (require 'foobar) statement that
loads some Emacs GPL'ed code?

Something to think about (But I don't have a clear answer).

Peter