Re: Including emacs-w3m in GNU ELPA

[Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

In [emacs-w3m : No.11872] Stefan Monnier wrote:
> Hi,

> I'd be interested in getting emacs-w3m included in GNU ELPA.
> Does that sound good to you?

I'd very much like to do that, but a couple of the core developers
seem to have obstacles that can't seem to get over easily.  IMO,
the most significant one is that some companies and organizations
in Japan aren't positive on allowing employees to hand over their
works to another even for the ones made in private time.  Moreover
employees don't want to be unjustly suspected about hobby works
that aren't related to their business.  This is the reason why
active Japanese people in the free software world aren't so many,
I think.

  As for me, I'm an electronic circuit engineer and have no
  interest in commercial software, so I believe I should never
  be blamed.  In fact, the intellectual property right division
  of a company answered to me that that's none of their business
  when I signed a paper to FSF.

One more matter is that some core developers who actively worked
in the early days are missing.  Teranishi-san, where are you?

Although they might be no more than 10~20% of people who made non-
trivial changes, I have to say it's hard to do it in concert with.
Anyway I wish people to clear it by themselves.

> If yes, then the main issue will be to get the copyright paperwork
> in order.  More specifically, we'd need all the people who contributed
> a non-trivial patch (like more than about 20 lines of code) to sign some
> copyright paperwork.  Contributions which have since been replaced by
> other code do not matter.
> So the first task would be to figure out who are those contributors, and
> how to contact them.

>         Stefan