Hi,
This note is just to update you on the GNU affiliation question. The
Unicon citizens who weighed in on the topic were in favor of becoming an
"official" GNU project. A couple users registered preferences, ranging from
mild to strong, for the BSD license or pure public domain. I appreciate
this position, and am more interested in technical issues, and in our
language being "useful", than in politics. But, our adoption of the GPL was
not the topic under discussion. Those who have contributed significantly
to the Unicon implementation ("citizens") ratified the adoption of the
GPL quite some time ago. The GPL was selected not to try to restrict or
protect Unicon, but to promise users that we would not hijack it down the
road and start hiding source code. We accept that not everybody agrees the
GPL adoption was a Good Thing, but the intentions were good.
Anyhow, so the question was whether, given that we are using the GPL,
we should apply to be an official "GNU" project. The answer was: well,
sure, if this gets us included in OS distributions that include GNU
software, it is a Good Thing. It is not a political statement. How
much value it adds to our community will depend on how effective
Jose Marchesi is. Again, our intentions are good, we don't think of
it as a big deal, and we hope you will help us grow the community.
Which brings us to the present. Jose has proposed to the FSF that we
become a GNU project, to which Richard Stallman asked:
RMS> Does Unicon have actual users, and are they happy with it?
These are excellent questions. :-)
I can partially answer the first question: at present there are 76 persons
on the Unicon mailing list. Some users are more active than others. I don't
know how many people use Unicon without subscribing to the list, but there
are "a fair number". I don't know how to predict our growth curve, or what
technical or marketing improvements are needed to spur us forward to a much
larger audience.
For the second question, if you have any opinions on whether you are happy
with Unicon that you'd be willing to share, I'd like to collect them and
pass them on to RMS and any others who come along asking that question.
I'd suggest you email them directly to me, rather than cluttering up the
list traffic; I will promise to post them on the Unicon web site so you
all can see what each other have said. If you mark your subject
"I am HAPPY with Unicon because"... or "I am UNHAPPY with Unicon because"...
then I will try to collect your feedback and categorize it correctly! It will
be pretty funny if bug reports permanently adopt the latter subject line :-)
but that is not the primary purpose of this request for feedback.
Cheers,
Clint [EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.S. I've been getting some good feedback on the recent Unicon book PDF
update; more corrections and suggestions are still in processing. The
corrected electronic code listings from the book at http://unicon.sf.net/book/
are growing and need further contributions; if you made corrections to one of
the book's program listings, please send me your corrected electronic copy
and I will get them posted and make the correction to the book.
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