This weekend's witch-hunt

[Mark Richards]

Rich Felker wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 18, 2006 at 11:52:43PM -0400, Mark Richards wrote:
>> If someone has an objection to a change in the license terms for code 
>> that they wrote,
> 
> As you'll see from the forensic analysis, there is no significant code
> which Bruce wrote.

Either Bruce has a claim or not.  He apparently believes that he does 
and that it's significant enough to make his request.  I cannot audit 
the code on his behalf and it's a bit one-sided to have the maintainer 
be judge, jury and executioner in an audit.  I was surprised that this 
process was not performed by an outside, non-partial person.  Perhaps 
what might be better is to have both parties audit, compare notes, and 
determine what to do next?

> Besides that, how would you propose to follow Bruce's request? If it
> takes a whole weekend of auditing to determine what (little) code
> Bruce actually holds copyright on, how is "The code written by Bruce
> Perens may be used under later versions of GPL as well as GPLv2..."
> feasible at all? Obviously it's become heavily intertwined with other
> code (this is BB 1.x, a derived work, not the original) and it would
> be impossible to license "just Bruce's code" under "v2 or later"
> without also affecting large amounts of other code (written by Rob and
> other authors) which he does NOT want to license under v3.
This is a lot more complex.  It might come down to Bruce giving bb/the 
maintainers a blanket release providing credit for contributions is 
maintained?  Maybe this could have been accomplished in the beginning 
had the approach been to secure it.

I think this opens (or re-opens) a debate about what kind of license bb 
ought to live under.  I am not in agreement with Rob's assertion that he 
would, and I am paraphrasing what I recall reading, "trust IBM over the 
FSF".  I live in the contrary camp.  Although I don't have any 
coding-stake in bb (but have been following along for some time and 
eventually want to) I'd hope that any license change would continue to 
disallow exclusive control of portions (or all) of the code.  I wouldn't 
want my hard work converted into a corporation's easy gain.

Hopefully the dispute and the licensing issues can all be worked through 
without acrimony.  It seems at the moment that this energy is a driving 
force, but in what direction?

/m