4 ms·
I find Richard's response perfectly reasonable. The work was donated to, copyright-assigned to, and done under the auspices of the FSF / GNU Project for years.
by tjr 14y ago
I find Richard's response perfectly reasonable. The work was donated to, copyright-assigned to, and done under the auspices of the FSF / GNU Project for years. Resigning from GNU and forking the project is one thing, but trying to remove the project from GNU is something else altogether.
- DanBC 14y agoReasonable, but dumb. The maintainer will fork the project under a new name, and continue to work for it. GNU will be left with a piece of software that slowly bitrots and becomes outdated, unless it can attract someone else to take it over.
- yuhong 14y agoI think it deserves a new name if it is no longer a GNU project anyway.
- dalke 14y agoWould you care to contribute something beyond what was discussed in the article? Do you also think gnuplot and Gnutella should change their names? Given that Nikos controls the gnutls.org domain, should be obligated to turn control over to gnu? For free, or can he charge them for the transfer?
- sigzero 14y agoOh...he should charge them all right.
- joe_the_user 14y agoIf the project is important enough for free soft in general, they'll find someone. If not, oh well, the cost for waste disposal of bit-rotted software project is rather small, no?
- DanBC 14y agoThey had someone, who seemed to be doing a good enough job. Now they have to find someone else to do that job, while competing with a new fork of the code. And the cost of obsolete code is not a bit of web storage; it reflects on the project as a whole. The GNU userland tools have been important for Linux. But what happens if people move to different user land tools? It's not super important, but it is a shame that people leave projects. Perhaps if free software and open source software had invested in a bunch of diplomats to translate the flames between De Raadt, Torvalds, Stallman, etc things would look very different today.
- dalke 14y agoThat sounds like a self-fulfilling statement. There are other options than the two you've outlined. What if they find someone to maintain it, who isn't that good? How come the GNU Hurd hasn't yet been disposed of?