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Hi folks,
Development for Wget has been proceeding about as planned, which is
pretty amazing considering that the few core developers we have are all
busy with their own "day jobs". We are very nearly ready to release Wget
version 1.11, and are confident that we would have been able to do so
by the target date, 15 September 2007.
Unfortunately, however, it looks as if we are going to miss that date
despite being code-ready, as there are some licensing issues with the
new GPLv3, in relation to the licensing exception we have in place to
permit users to link with the OpenSSL library. Obviously, this sort of
thing is not exclusive to GNU Wget; other projects with the same or
similar exceptions are also waiting for this issue to be resolved.
Here's a snippit from an announcement by Brett Smith, FSF's "licensing
guru":
> Unfortunately, updating the exceptions has proven to be more difficult than
> we first thought. That's not because simply changing the words to line up
> with GPLv3's is hard; that part's still easy. However, all of these
> exceptions were written at a time when GPLv2 was the only version of the
> license in serious use. Now, for the exceptions that talk about
> relationships with software under other licenses, we have to figure out how
> to update the text so that it interacts with GPLv2 software properly. And
> this part is not always so easy.
>
> Our lawyers at SFLC are working on all this, and making progress; it's just
> taking more time than we originally thought.
Hopefully, we will be able to release by some time in October, or
possibly late September. In the meantime, it gives us time to fix a
couple of extra bugs we weren't sure would be fixed in time for 1.11,
and to get some extra testing in.
Of course, we technically could revert the merges of GPLv3 from Wget,
and release 1.11 on-schedule under GPLv2 ("or any later version"). If
the licensing issues aren't still resolved by late October, I may
consider doing that; however, I would prefer (and I believe RMS would
prefer) that the next release of GNU Wget be under the GPLv3 (and up). I
know that RMS wants as many GNU projects as possible to be licensed
under the GPLv3 as of right now; and I'd rather avoid making a separate
release of Wget 1.11.1 (or whatever) just for the relicensing.
Thanks, everyone, for your patience and understanding. We look forward
to releasing GNU Wget 1.11 in October.
- --
Micah J. Cowan
GNU Wget Maintainer
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