Re: gpg-ring.el/gpg.el?

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> Josh Huber <huber@alum.wpi.edu> writes:
>
>> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>>
>>> FSF doesn't have papers for it.
>>
>> Bummer, is the author going to do it, or what?
>
> I think lawyers are involved.

I don't know, the FSF never told the copyright holder what they were
doing internally.  There are some rumors.  Currently, we (University
of Stuttgart) hope to assign copyright (well, the non-exclusive
usufruct of a copyright) to FSF Europe, German branch, but before this
can happen, FSF U.S. and FSF Europe have to agree on the modus
operandi.

If you want to have gpg.el in the GNU Emacs or GNU Privacy Guard
distribution, and you are familiar with the internal structure of the
FSF U.S., you might want to ask the right person there to continue
negotiations.  After proposing a draft contract and convincing RMS
that German copyright law is substantially different from U.S. law,
the negotiations stopped, and we have never heard anything back from
the FSF U.S.

(As an additional benefit, I'm able to work again on gpg.el and
gpg-ring.el, a security audit of the Gnus RFC 3156 support is planned,
you'll get a few security fixes for GNU Emacs on HP-UX and AIX, and
perhaps a few GnuPG changes, although the latter are probably OBE
now.)