[gentoo-dev] Re: Adding Nipper license to the tree

[Duncan]

"Tony \"Chainsaw\" Vroon" <chainsaw@g.o> posted
1245111501.11818.5.camel@localhost, excerpted below, on  Tue, 16 Jun 2009
01:18:21 +0100:

> On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 00:58 +0100, Mike Auty wrote:
>> So I'll leave the source version out of the tree, but I'd like thoughts
>> on using RPM as a solution?  Also I don't know whether an exception
>> could be made for Gentoo, but equally I don't know how to phrase one of
>> them either (Gentoo Foundation or all Gentoo developers), so I'm
>> hesitant to ask.  If anyone has any other ideas or possibilities, do
>> let me know.  Thanks...
>
> Drop it from the tree entirely. Leave it to them to provide ebuilds.
> Obviously they do not want this software to be packaged by you, if they
> did they wouldn't put this intricate obstacle course in your way.
> Sometimes life can be so simple.

I agree.[1]  The intent of the license is clear enough, make it 
proprietary, with enough questions about the legal implications and 
effectiveness of said license that it's simply not worth the hassle and 
risk.

I honestly don't know why he's trying to do this.  As others have pointed 
out, either his software is valuable enough to be worth forking, and it 
WILL fork (with the entire community shipping the freedomware fork), or 
it's not, and he's effectively sentencing it to some likely obscure 
proprietaryware niche.  The friendly dual-license route would seem much 
more effective at doing what he seems to want to do. <shrug>

.....

[1] I wrote (and revised...) an earlier reply coming to about the same 
conclusion, but decided the SNR wasn't high enough to send and the 
revisions weren't helping, so I sent it to /dev/null.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman