Re: Non-free package licenses and replacements
On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 01:33:21AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.iki.fi> writes:
> > I humbly suggest that my own work, Enemies of Carlotta, would also be an
> > obvious replacement to recommend, given that it actually tries to mimic
> > the Ezmlm mail commands (foo-subscribe@domain and so on) and thus is
> > less of a surprise for the users.
>
> Good point. Even better. I was working off of the example of
> recommending tin, nn, etc. as replacements for trn,
I'm not sure that that's a good example. Speaking as trn4 maintainer,
the reason I'm willing to maintain a non-free package whose code quality
is quite so ... exciting ... is that its user interface is utterly wired
into my brain and I'd find switching to another newsreader to be a
non-trivial proposition. I know other trn users who'd say the same thing
(in fact, some of them are attached to trn 3 and aren't interested in
the newer version). Programs with a direct user interface are often like
that.
trn4 was actually briefly BSD-licensed until the maintainer realized
that there's a fragment of code owned by Stan Barber in there who (I'm
told) wasn't interested in relicensing it. The intent is there; the
relevant code just needs to be tracked down and rewritten.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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