Re: Hurd Fork: Announcement & Invitation

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Amos Jeffries <squid3@treenet.co.nz> writes:
>>>>> On 21/07/18 09:37, Ranvijay Kumar Vijay wrote:

[…]

 >> because I’ve seen discussions on the net where people didn’t want to
 >> be a part of Hurd just because it requires Copyright assignment to FSF.

 >> I personally think they are mistaken, but have created this project
 >> to save time from clearing their misunderstandings.

 > While your intentions may be pure, this looks more like an attempted
 > hijack to me.

        So long as we stick to the essential freedoms [1], forks are
        valid.  They may be suboptimal investment of one’s time and
        effort, but it’s in the eye of beholder, is it not?

[1] What is free software?  URI: http://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

 > The result is likely to distract people not already involved with the
 > copyright disagreement and place their work into an area which cannot
 > be fed back to the Hurd itself.  Due to the explicit copyright
 > intentions of those people you mention, their work and anything
 > relying on it directly (as the forked code would) cannot be submitted
 > to the FSF project for inclusion in Hurd.

        Frankly, I fail to see much difference here; if one publishes
        a modification for Hurd, it’s either covered by an assignment,
        or it isn’t.  And in the latter case, the author (or copyright
        holder in general) can always assign copyright at a latter time.

        So, if a contribution goes to a Hurd fork, and its author later
        signs up the copyright assignment and states that that contribution
        is indeed covered, the contribution can be included in GNU Hurd.

 > So the most likely outcomes will either be a large increase in
 > porting work placed on the shoulders of the already limited Hurd
 > community,

        The only problem of sorts there’s with such forks is that if
        a patch is contributed to a fork, and said patch is not covered
        by a copyright assignment, then /no similar patch/ (code-wise,
        not idea-wise, as copyright covers expressions, not ideas) can
        enter GNU Hurd.

 > or moving control of the Hurd brand away from the FSF over to
 > yourself.

        I don’t think I understand this.

-- 
FSF associate member #7257  http://am-1.org/~ivan/