If someone just looks at the project, they see GPL on the savannah
page, and then they download links to non-free code (jpgraph) and see
someone trying to re-license the project, how should they react?
Don't I have the ethical responsibility as someone who accepts the
debian socal contract, the ACM code of ethics, the GNU manifesto, to
shout out and say "WTF!!?!"
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.
The ransom model is great, and there is also a ransom license from a
very bright young man, Adam theo, who I have much respect for.
http://www.theoretic.com/Ransom/Home
I would publically support your efforts to make a sourceforge project
under the Ransom model, when it would be turned into GPL at a later
stage. Please do so. You can even create a derived work, but not in the
same publically accessable cvs.
The thing about hostages is this :
you cannot put the onto a public cvs. If you want to make a hostage,
then you need to hide them from the anti-terror squad. You cannot mix a
CVS with GPL and Ransom code.
If you want to do this right, setup a new project, put it under the
Ransom license, and dont allow access to the sourcecode to people who
dont aggree to it. As soon as a user sees the ransomed source, they are
in a moral dillemma. Do they say : oh that is silly, I can do that! and
if they do, they have seen your code. Or do they say, oh wow, I need
that. Or do they say, WTF?! why is this code with a different license
in a GPLEd repository.