Hi Rusty,
Since you are not currently actively involved in Wesnoth development, you may
not realize that there has been some discussion among the developers already,
in #wesnoth-dev IRC channel and several threads on the forums, for example. The
existence of iPhone development in particular was not a secret and has been
known for some time now.
However, I agree that this new FSF GPL issue should have been brought up by now
on the developer mailing list, and that was an oversight which I'm glad has now
been corrected. That was a mistake in my opinion. On the other hand, discussing
legal matters in a public format seems risky for those who aren't legal
experts, so maybe you can understand the wariness involved?
Having said that, I really don't sympathize with your arguments. You
essentially are saying that you want Battle for Wesnoth to be used as a tool in
the "Freeness" war against Apple, regardless of the wishes of the Lead
Developer of Wesnoth, the active developers of Wesnoth, or the Wesnoth userbase
itself. To me that seems selfish, not selfless. If you have a low opinion of
Apple and their restrictive licenses, which I know I certainly do, there are
plenty of other ways to go about expressing it. For example, we can use other
hardware than the iPhone or use a jail-broken iPhone.
Personally, I would never buy an iPhone for exactly this reason. However, a lot
of my friends have iPhones and aren't technically savvy enough to load
unapproved software onto them, yet I still want them to be able to enjoy
Wesnoth. To me, this is no different than the user with a slow internet
connection who is willing to spend a few dollars for a Wesnoth CD in the mail,
or perhaps a better analogy would be a paranoid user who doesn't want to build
Wesnoth for himself but is willing to pay for some assurances that the person
who built it didn't include any virus payload.
If Dave and the other developers and users really wanted to turn this game into
a Battle against Apple, then I would be OK with that. But since they clearly
don't, and this port was officially blessed from the beginning, and there was
plenty of time to object to it before (but you didn't), I can't help but see
this as anything more than a selfish move on your part right now. If that is
really your attitude then I look forward to seeing your name struck out of the
credits.
--Patrick
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