I don't really understand what exactly this is. It looks like an open source version of emacs, but I don't understand how it is commercial. Could someone explain more or point to a better description of the project?
Maybe he doesn't like the copyright assignment requirement? Fair, maybe, but I personally think it's not a big deal.
"Commit rights" sounds like the bad old days of CVS/SVN. Send a pull request to GNU Emacs, get rejected or accepted. It's a lot easier nowadays.
GNU Emacs doesn't use pull requests.
Just because it's not GitHub doesn't mean it doesn't use pull requests (which predate GitHub, all the way back to Git's first releases in 2005).
The base problem is: who has standing to sue if there is a GPL violation. People have sued in this case when it was Linux (which does not require an assignment), but no defendant has yet tried the defense “you don’t have standing to sue me because you are not the copyright holder of the lines of code in question”. Like the FSF, I fear that this could unfortunately be a very effective defense (against being sued for violating the license) in most jurisdictions.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
Edit: Case timeline: sued in state court as a contract claim, vizio moved it to federal court saying its a copyright claim, federal judge kicked it back to state court to hear the contract claim.
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/may/16/vizio-remand-win/
In the U.S. . The GPL tries to match different international law systems.
The idea is at least that the FSF can update a buttload of code to GPL 4, 5, 900, etc if a flaw in GPL is discovered.
Suppose I don't sign over copyright. Instead I license my code to the world under GPLv3, and you incorporate it into your project. You can use and share my code under the terms of GPLv3, of course. But that doesn't mean you can share it under a future GPL version, say GPLv99, without my permission -- because the terms of those versions may be incompatible.
The normal state of affairs for a GPL'ed project is having mixed copyright. After all, you can't stop anyone from forking to add their own, copyrighted, changes. That's the whole point.
If mixed copyright means the GPL doesn't well enough, then the GPL doesn't work well enough, period. This is not an anti-GPL statement, on the contrary: Most people seem to trust the GPL well enough to not require copyright assignment. The FSF is the odd one out.
It's rarer to encounter projects that remove that language (most importantly, Linux kernel)
It sounds like the author wants to add these features to main-line emacs, and expect other people to maintain it while he holds some kind of copyright.
Emacs is one of the last pieces of software people would want to "move fast and break things". And what does copyright or ownership even get you?
They took something existing that's been worked on since probably before he was born, agreed to the license, and added features only they have reviewed and tested. And I guess expected to face little resistance to get his code in to be tested and maintained by everyone else.
It doesn't even sound like it's a big deal to maintain their branch. They said mainline is merged in every hour. The hardest part sounds like adding a different URL in your package manager and dealing with a rare merge conflict (which you could easily put off for a long time if you don't care about bleeding edge).
So weird is extremely accurate.
have to rename it as specified in the license The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.
The FSF have a list of issues. At least GitLab (even EE) has freely licensed JavaScript