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Re: the ncurses "brushfire" -- anybody want to take over the project?



> The senior maintainers and copyright holders of ncurses (Zeyd benHalim
> and myself) both feel very strongly that Thomas Dickey hijacked the
> project in a way that was unethical, injurious to the interests of
> the free-software community, and arguably flat-out illegal under our
> license terms.
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
       Huh?

     You mean it's not free software, right?

I just looked at the license (in /usr/doc/copyright/ncurses3.0 on my
system) - and I was alarmed to see that there was no grant of license
to actually modify the code.

I then went to check the actual source code, and again, the same
thing.

If other people are not allowed to modify the code, then ncurses does
not qualify for the Debian stamp of approval as 'free software', and
should be moved to non-free.  In addition, all of the programs 
compiled against it should be moved out of the main distribution,
and into contrib.

I'm sure glad I've never programmed anything against ncurses.

Or did I miss something?

Cheers, from a slightly alarmed,

 - Jim


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