On 18 May 2002, at 1:22, Jeremy Taffel wrote: > Wolfgang, > > I detect from the tone of your response that you are a bit cheesed off with > Richard's comments on the proposed licence. I'm not cheesed off by the reply. I'm cheesed off when reference is made to private correspondence.
> I think that he has some valid points which you don't seem to have > understood. Thanks.Why is it that I'm not supposed to have understood things when I just don't agree with the opinions expressed. > Think of it this way: Richard has done a good job with UQLX and > has it working on may flavours of Unix, on different platforms and > processors. I don't doubt that. > It would benefit the community to SMSQ to have it supported by > UQLX, and have Richard's Unixy extensions within it as he has already done > for JS and Minerva. However, he does not have continous access to all those > platforms, and definitely not all the combinations of interface cards, > displays etc they come with. He therefore cannot guarantee support, or to > fix problems. He helps where he can, and in the spirit of GNU etc, he makes > the information available so that technically advanced users can help > themselves. "In the spirit of the GNU licence" says it all - the proposed licence isn't in that spirit. So he wants to program something, but not support it later on. Nice. > Under the current proposed licence, he cannot operate in this reasonable > way. Says he. > He cannot merely do his best, but he has to give an open-ended > commitment to provide support -something that few if any software vendors > would do. He isn't even allowed to provide effective support -emailing > patches, assistance over the phone of how to hack a config file ....outlawed > by the proposed licence. We are looking into the email aspect. Moreover, I think your comments very clearly outline one of the aspects I care about. He 'or anybody else) can send the source code to interested parties. If they can compile the source code, then they probabbly will only need minimal support, if any at all. However, the "normal" end user won't be able to compile it - but he would need support. So he doesn't get access to the binaries in the first case - and won't need support either. The scheme as it stands now provides for both cases - you can't just let the binaries out in the open, have end users play around with it and them leave them without support. > Furthermore having expended much time and effort -and potentially money if > he has to buy hardware, or technical consultancy to enable him to provide > the support, you can pull the plug at any time by tearing the licence up. That's true. What would be my interest in doing so? > This is not the way to encourage the few souls who are both willing and > capable of making SMSQ available and useful to a wider audience to harness > their talents to our mutual benefit. Oh? What wider audience? DO you really mean that letting an unsupported OS float around the shareware scenen would make for a wider audience? > I really do urge you to rethink this. Conversely, I would be interested to > know how you intend to police the licence; it seems to me to be impossible, > so perhaps Richard and others like him need not worry. Policing the licence? We'll see - i don't really foresee that this would be much of an option, apart from telling the people involved and putting them to public opprobium here. On the other hand, if I do notice something illegal going on, I might just sue - here in France. > > p.s. Most unix distributions include an emulators package these days. Think > how many extra users we might end up with (or ex-users that return) if we > could get them to add UQLX +SMSQ etc into that package? I know exactly how many : none. Wolfgang ----------------- www.wlenerz.com
