Re: [Savannah-hackers] Re: [Gforge-devel] gforge

[Tim Perdue]

Dan Kuykendall wrote:
> I just want to jump in an defend Tim on this a bit. I have seen this 
> many times in the Free Software world, where some people will jump into 
> full attack mode WAY to quickly about license issues.
> We should always assume that these licensing issues are an oversight or 
> misunderstanding. We should always start by contacting the author and 
> seeing what it is that we can do to help resolve the issue, in as 
> friendly a manner as possible. I have seen this with companies that sell 
> versions of phpGroupWare. Some of my team has jumped down their throats 
> and this is simply the wrong way to handle these situations. It only 
> makes us look like extremists when there is no reason to be.
>
> In Tims case I would assume, based on what I know of him, that he is 
> working on gForge for the pure enjoyment of it. He would also work to 
> stay in license complaince, but if we start bashing him and taking away 
> the fun of such a project then it could diminish the great work he is 
> doing. So even if he doesnt want to spend the time to cut and paste the 
> license text into each file, then one of us should volunteer to do it 
> for him. In fact I will put myself up for the task, even tho I am pretty 
> busy with everything else Im doing. I think gForge, and Tims work is at 
> least worth such a small contribution to making things easier for him.
>
> So lets remember that we are all working on the same team. We can same 
> our venom on the Microsofts of the world.

Thank you. Yes, this was a misunderstanding. Before I mentioned my 
reporting piece publicly, I talked to Bruce Perens on the telephone and 
he said it should not be a problem as long as we are pursuing 
"releasing" it from "hostage" status with certain things we are doing 
behind the scenes. Bruce is trying to "sell" gforge and other OSS 
services to large corporations and there are various things going on 
around this effort. A small "hostage fee" from a major corporation is 
peanuts to them.

I definitely feel burned on this - I don't think I have any energy to 
pursue future development on this at all. I'm really put off by this 
vicious attitude, especially from JM Dupont.

Tim