Re: [Notion-devel] what we're waiting for

[kevin g. <kev...@gm...>]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 10:25 AM, M Rawash <mr...@gm...> wrote:
> hi everybody, thought I'd give you a little update of what's going on.
> Ole Brønner and I spoke earlier about our legal situation (with regard
> to Tuomo's license); he's in favour of getting Tuomo's blessing to fork
> the latest Ion3(plus) release, while i'm in favour of forking an earlier
> version of Ion that didn't include Tuomo's terms. Ole has contacted
> Tuomo and we have set a deadline ("a couple of days") for a response,
> and since it's very likely that Tuomo won't respond, i think we should
> be aware of our other options while we wait, and here they are:
>
> - forking Ion while keeping Tuomo's license, this, of course, will
> render the fork 'non-free', and infringe on our own right to license any
> future work under a different license.
>
> - fork Ion and change the license (possibly to GPL), this will leave us
> vulnerable to Tuomo's hostility (assuming he is indeed hostile), since
> it's basically 'illegal' in light of Tuomo's additional terms (which,
> according to Tuomo, "take precedence over the LGPL").
>
> - fork an earlier version of Ion that didn't include Tuomo's additional
> terms (or one that had a loophole in it), this means a lot of extra
> work, when many people would like to see us moving on (start adding new
> features, rather than going back and fix/add old ones).
>

Another "PRO" for this option is the libtu and libextl situation.
AFAIK these libraries are also unmaintained now, and I don't imagine
them growing in popularity to the point of it being helpful to have
them as separate libraries.  IIRC, they were still part of the same
package at the point when the license changes were made, so will be
part of our original code.  I haven't had a chance to really dig in,
so for all I know this might be a trivial issue.  All I know is this
is the issue I ran into (trying to compile/install ion3 on a fresh
system and failing since libtu/libextl were missing) that made me
aware of the true extent of the problem.

Also, what are the libtu and libextl licenses like?  if they're
standard lgpl we have a great deal of flexibility with what we do with
them, to the point of possibly using the latest libtu/libextl along
with the older version of ion as a starting point, but if they are a
similar modified license, it seems it will be all-or-nothing with
regard to which version of the sources we use as a starting point.

On another note, how much information do we have available concerning
the issues that were fixed in the time between the license change and
the most recent release?  It will make a rather large difference to
how easy that work will be to reproduce if we have detailed
information about the bugs we want to work on.
More concretely, which resources would we be able to use if we do use
the pre-license-change source code as a starting point:
mailing list archives
darcs commit messages
changelog
other???

Thanks for the update,
Kevin Granade

>
> as you can see, all our options are lacking in one way or another, so
> it'd indeed be good if we could get Tuomo's blessing, but i think we
> should remain realistic going forward; so if you have other
> ideas/opinions, please, do tell.
>
> regards,
> M Rawash
>
>
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