Re: [XBoard-devel] Re: patches

[Tim Mann]

FSF prefers to own all the code in official GNU projects, but it's not
an absolute requirement.  Offhand it sounds okay to me to use a dialog
from another GPL'ed project that wasn't assigned to the FSF.

Stepping back from this one issue, though, I really hope to see the GTK
version get far enough along that everyone can be working on that one
and let the Athena Widgets version die.  This will save HG and anyone
else working on the current version a lot of effort trying to hack
around the deficiencies in the ancient Xaw widget set.

        --Tim

On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:52:35 +0100, "h.g. muller" <address@hidden> wrote:
> At 16:50 14-12-2009 -0800, Arun Persaud wrote:
> >Hi
> >
> >haven't managed to get to all your patches yet, got about half of them
> >into my local git tree. One problem lies with the new file-chooser: we
> >would probably need them to sign the copyright notice. But since the
> >gtk-version comes with a nice file chooser, perhaps we shouldn't bother
> >to include this one and just wait for the gtk-release...
> 
> .....
> 
> >cheers
> >      ARUN
> 
> As this concerns a policy matter I want to throw it into the open discussion.
> 
> I don't see why we should ask the authors of Ghostview to sign over the
> rights on their program to us (= FSF). If Ghostview is already property of
> FSF, then fine. But if it is not, this would be a completely out-of-place
> request, that I would certainly refuse flat out if I were the Ghostview 
> author.
> It is rather like asing Micro-Soft: "well, we compiled XBoard using your
> Visual C++ compiler, so now please sign over the copyrights on all libraries
> you normally include in that package and that we linked to to us".
> 
> I see no logical reason why FSF should own copyrights on files we include
> with XBoard that clearly only contain code from the Ghostview project,
> with zero copyrightable addition by us. If someone would copy that code,
> and use it in violation of the GPL (under which both Ghostview and XBoard
> are released), they will have stolen code from Ghostview, and not from
> XBoard. So there will be nothing to enforce for us in that case.
> 
> In general I am strongly opposed to withholding improvements to XBoard
> for silly reasons. If we have a better version, we should release it as 
> quickly
> as possible. It might take a year before the gtk version is at the level where
> XBoard was in 2001, and we might very well never get there. So waiting
> for it while we have smethng that is fit for release immediately is a really
> bad idea.
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/