Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-project] eudev project announcement

[Richard Yao]

On 12/15/2012 11:20 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> Gentoo isn't GitHub.  When people donate money to Gentoo they're not
> donating so that a club of elite coders can use the infrastructure to
> host just anything that suits their fancy.  The reason that we let any
> Gentoo developer just start a project is because it helps promote
> innovation and cuts through bureaucracy.  That doesn't mean that
> Gentoo holds no interest in the work that is done under its name.

I made the github comparison as a simplification to preempt further
notions of the idea that being a Gentoo project reflects a collective
agreement that we are abandoning systemd-udevd in our distribution.

> I think that Duncan pointed out a great reason to use LGPL, and using
> a license that lets us better collaborate with the overall FOSS
> community is something I think is well-aligned with Gentoo's mission
> (We Will Give Back to the Free Software Community).  However, if we
> use LGPL it should because of something like this, and not simply be
> because those working on the project picked it.  If for whatever
> reason the fork diverges to a point where we aren't giving back in the
> form of patches to upstream then I'd argue that it would make sense to
> move back to the GPL (something trivially done with or without
> copyright assignment due to the nature of the LGPL).

The systemd developers have made it clear that they are not interested
in our changes. That is why we forked in the first place. Our plan is to
keep the door open for them to cherry-pick patches should they decide to
start supporting some of the system configurations that we support. I
consider this to be the reason why OSS developers give away source code
in the first place.