From: Neon John <jgd_at_johngsbbq.com>
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 13:46:17 -0500

On Wed, 8 Mar 2006 16:36:18 +0100 (CET), Daniel Stenberg
<daniel_at_rockbox.org> wrote:

>On Wed, 8 Mar 2006, gl wrote:
>
>> After Linus was about to commit one of my patches, it turns out the project
>> leaders are not willing to accept contributions under a pseudonym. This may
>> be normal in the GPL world, but for someone from the Windows / BSD license
>> world, this seems utterly bizarre.
>
>Since we had this debate the last time, a large amount of Open Source projects
>have gone a lot stricter in this department and we are certainly not alone in
>this stand-point. Some of them are BSD-style too.

Yes, that's the easy way out. It takes courage and integrity to stand
up to whatever the fascist phobia of the moment is passing through.

>
>It is not about what license we use. To me, it is about who does what in a
>legal / copyright angle and that we are a real project with real people using
>real names.

From a legal/copyright angle, I find this amusing coming from the same
people who flagrantly reverse-engineered and de-scrambled the binaries
of more than one commercial product, the EULA for which undoubtedly
prohibited same. This seems to be a highly selective "legal/copyright
angle."

(For new readers, I should clarify that I'm of the "stick it up yer
*ss" camp regarding fascist EULAs and copyright "law" bought and paid
for by major corps.)

Someone noted that there have been "only" two developers who've been
rejected on this issue. I have to wonder how many others have looked
at the situation and said "oh, f*ck it, not worth the hassles". Put
me in that camp.

This seems even more prescient right now when the major development
effort has headed off toward new hardware. There are things that
still need to be done to the core feature list and the most likely
candidates to do that would be casual programmers who are not involved
in the leading edge "hacking the hardware" work of the core team. I
certainly have my list.

I debate with myself at least once a week whether to set up a dev
environment and do the things I want done. What brings me back to
rationality is that I don't want to have to maintain a separate code
fork indefinitely.

I think that you guys need to take a serious re-think on this
selective copyright concern. To me it's a smoke-screen for "my way or
the highway".

John

---
John De Armond
See my website for my current email address
http://www.johngsbbq.com
Cleveland, Occupied TN
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Received on 2006-03-08