[Disclaimer: I think we're getting off-topic here; I encourage anyone
who would like to talk to me on this subject to do it out of this list]
Thanks for your summary, Michael. I think you had good reasons to fork
gmp and you exercised your right to do it.
On Fri, 2008-06-06 at 05:03 +0200, Michael Abshoff wrote:
> GMP up and including to the 4.2.1 release was licensed under the LGPL
> V2.1+. The 4.2.2 release which only added a couple bug fixes was then
> released under the LGPL V3+ by the maintainer without any feedback
> from the GMP community, i.e. there was never a discussion about
> whether it would be a good idea to switch to a new license.
gmp is part of the GNU project. The leaders of the GNU project decided
to move to (L)GMP v3+.
> ...The GMP project is not developer friendly...The working code
> repository of GMP is closed. There is no public svn, etc.
> repositoryyo so that anybody can look at the latest version of the GMP
> code. See 2.
My advice is that you tell this to the leader of the GNU project. Every
GNU package is expected to have a page in savannah.gnu.org and a
repository; the fact that gmp does not have one is an irregularity that
should be brought to the attention of the copyright holder (FSF).
> [personal opinion]
> ...*some* FSF advocates consider the fact that GPLed software is
> being ported and used on Windows a bad thing since it helps people
> stick to non-free alternatives and that is a code word for using
> Windows.
I helped the FSF during three years with the administration of Savannah.
Our view, as Savannah administrators, was misunderstood very often. We
used to approve only projects that worked in free operating systems as
well as, or even better than in proprietary operating systems. That does
not mean we considered a bad thing that a free software package run
perfectly well in Windows; on the contrary, we also wanted to serve
people that use Windows. What we saw as a bad thing was hosting in
Savannah software projects that did not work well with the GNU/Linux
system and worked better with Windows, since Savannah is the repository
for the GNU project. There are other places where those projects should
be hosted.
Regards,
Jaime Villate