Re: Packages needing a new maintainer
On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 04:22:02AM -0400, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 06:17:21PM +0300, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
> > mmorph - a two-level morphology implementation
> >
> > Upstream is very unresponsive but still alive. There is
> > another Linux port that should be investigated. There is
> > one outstanding bug that I have not been able to resolve
> > (possibly requires signing an NDA on a dataset to reproduce,
> > possibly not our bug at all).
>
> Boy, I sure hope anyone who adopts this would refuse to do that.
>
> User comes to you and says "fix my bug, but for you to reproduce it I'm
> going to need to shackle you with these legal conditions"? To hell with
> that.
I haven't looked at the above bug, but I don't think this is
necessarily unreasonably or contrary to the spirit of free software.
Consider: [No, I'm not the author of a database package, it's an
example]
User: Hey, Jules, your JellyDB rocks!
Me: Well, thanks!
User: I've found a nasty bug, though, it hangs sometimes when I do a
query involving ....
[I work with the user, looking at his query, but we can't work out
between us what is broken. He looks at the source with me, but he's
no guru]
Me: Any chance I can look at your dataset? I'll replicate the
problem here, and then it'll be easier to track down!
User: Uh, the thing is, I work in a hospital; this is confidential
medical records. I'd need you to sign a strict confidentiality
agreement with me.
Me: Hey, no problem!
I don't think the hypothetical Me did anything against the spirit of
free software there. I don't approve of NDAs for hardware specs, etc,
but I can see that there are plenty of other kinds of confidential
information which might help replicate a bug, and I'd certainly be
prepared to swear confidentiality on that.
Jules
--
Jules Bean | Any sufficiently advanced
jules@{debian.org,jellybean.co.uk} | technology is indistinguishable
jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | from a perl script
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