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

[Roland Mas]

Tim Perdue (2003-02-12 15:21:44 -0600) :

> James, you are not involved in the GForge project and have not
> committed even one line of code to the project, as far as I
> know. You are not "in the loop", nor do you have any reason to be.

Mostly true, but not quite.  See patches #364 and #365, which have
been merged in Debian-SF before Gforge.

> Approx 80% of GForge is rewritten code - a very large piece of that
> is by me, working on my own time and my own initiative. I am not
> being paid by a corporation for my work. I am paying for the hosting
> of GForge.org off of profits from my other consulting gigs (Perdue,
> Inc.).

  Point of information: even the 80% of rewritten code is still based
on Sourceforge, so it's still a derived work.  Licensing problems and
money problems are different ones, and if you want to be able to
decide what license the code is, you'll have to rewrite everything
from scratch.  Including the database schema.

[...]

> This is exactly what was done. I have not placed my code in CVS, nor
> shown it to anyone. I have not even had time to debug it because I
> am busy on other things. I have merely placed a screenshot of it
> online and get attacked by you and a couple other people.

  As I understand it, and assuming I belong to that "couple other
people", the problem was not your developing a proprietary extension
per se.  The problem was relicensing some code that you don't fully
own, and that you were given under a specific license that forbids it
(GPL v2, §2.b).  That, or writing LGPL code explicitly tailored to
link to GPL code *and* proprietary code.  The fact that you're the
same person than the one who wrote the original GPL code doesn't give
you ownership of it: most of the current code is still based on stuff
copyrighted by VA Linux, Christian, myself, and other people who
submitted patches.  All these people have to explicitly agree for a
license change to happen.  Even James Michael Dupont, who contributed
two patches that were applied and merged in the CVS repository of what
later became Gforge.

> Today I have pulled it all down and have no intention of releasing
> it under GPL. I've thought about deleting it and saying "piss on
> it".

  Sad, but it's your call.

Roland.
-- 
Roland Mas

- Ogenki desuka, yau de poêle ?
- Genki desu, ture en zinc.