ess/debian/copyright

[Stephen Eglen]

This copyright issue discussion has brought to mind something I've
thought about for a while:  would we ever wish for ESS to be
distributed as part of GNU Emacs (can't speak for XEmacs)?  

If putting ESS into GNU Emacs is desirable, copyright papers will be
needed from all ESS authors past and present; getting the
debian/copyright file accurate might help in this process, but still
there may be some authors who would prefer not to assign copyright
over to FSF (this sometimes happens; e.g. the VM mail reader).

Assuming we can get the papers signed,  it would then be a case of me
talking to the emacs-devel team to see if they think it appropriate to
add ESS (i could do that before we go to the effort of collecting
paperword).

That might be nice... but I do wonder whether it would be worth it:

- Emacs releases are infrequent, so the version of ESS included in
  Emacs would soon be out of date.

- thanks to Vincent Goulet, windows users already can get ESS for free
  as part of his Emacs distribution.

- there'd be a slight maintenance issue of uploading ESS into Emacs (I
could do that).

Stephen