Some people were contacted by one of the current GNU Emacs maintainers and requested to assign copyright to the FSF in order to allow Slime be distributed with GNU Emacs.
I'm still having mail server issues (seems like I'm only able to send mail on full moon), and hence could not participate in a short internal roundabout mail between Luke and Helmut.
Helmut rightly said that the matter should be discussed on the mailing list anyway.
So below follows undelivered mail, and represent my thoughts right after having read about the request.
Seems futile to me. Too many contributors over the time. Will the SWANK side not be included? (Then how is that supposed to be distributed?)
SWANK is actually PD, not GPL. There's this saying that Germans (and maybe Austrians, too?) cannot legally give up their copyright and hence cannot actually release stuff in public domain. So the situation of the SWANK side is pretty muddy to begin with.
Supposing all these legal matters get sorted out, and someone of the FSF actually does all the legal work and gets the necessary assignments (an Heracles job in my eyes), and Slime becomes part of Emacs, then there's still the issue how future contributions are supposed to be dealt with and whether need for assignment may be regarded as an obstacle for contribution. OTOH, I don't see major contribution happening.
And then yet another issue is synchronization between a Slime development tree, and the putative Slime Emacs tree; no one has so far stepped up who actually wants to take care of regular releases of Slime which then may become a prerequisite of some sort.
In short: too much hassle for too little gain. On the other hand, it's not really my hassle, so I don't really object to the idea.
I think there's a new packaging system being developed for Emacs for third-party contributions. It strikes me that may a better fit for Slime.
-T.