This weekend's witch-hunt

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 10:27:06AM -0400, Mark Richards wrote:
> 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.

He can make the _request_ regardless of how little or much code he has
in it, but even if 99% of BB were his code, he CANNOT REQUIRE PEOPLE
TO MAKE DERIVATIVE WORKS AVAILABLE UNDER GPLv3 since he licensed it
under v2 or later, at the licensee's option. Anything else is
irrelevant. The point of Rob's audit is just to convince Bruce to go
away.

> 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?

Huh???

> I think this opens (or re-opens) a debate about what kind of license bb 
> ought to live under.

No, it just proves that some people are too stupid to read the license
they're using...

> 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.

Me too. But that doesn't mean I'm going to go along with all the FSF's
shenanigans. The ideology of the FSF as far as the fundamental
freedoms they demand is rock solid, but oftentimes their methods are
ridiculous and self-defeating. And ever since RMS quit coding and
turned everything over to Drepper and the Redhat folks, their code
plain sucks...

> 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?

This has been going on too long already and everyone is sick of it.
I've had arguments on both sides but at this point I just want Bruce
to go away and accept that the project maintainers (or anyone who
forks the code from its original author) is able to use the code under
GPLv2 and not forced to also license the derived work under "or
later".

Rich