XForms [Re: kicking non-free archive out without a vote]
Steve Langasek wrote:
> Peter,
>
> On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, Peter S Galbraith wrote:
>
> > I haven't been the XForms maintainer for very long, but that
> > package is certainly a good candidate for removal. I was waiting
> > for XForms to be Open Source and then _all_ current libforms
> > packages would be removed in favour of a new one for main. But
> > that hasn't happened yet.
>
> Didn't the XForms author deliberately switch from a free to a
> non-free license a couple years ago? If you're making headway
> in convincing the author to release XForms as free software
> again, that's great to hear -- it's just a little surprising to
> me, given what I remember of the software's history.
I've never known it to be free. It has always been a binary-only
release, which makes it very difficult to get it for all arches.
I made four builds for V0.88 and V0.89 uploads to Debian
yesterday, and I'm getting tired of the hassle (slowly).
I don't know how much headway _I'm_ making. I first emailed him
about it in June 1999 with gentle comments reasoning why it could
and should be open-source, and he replied that he was thinking
about it. So I doubt that I was a significant factor in the
decision. However, I have reminded him a few times since then
and have gotten promises that V1.0 will be Open Source. I guess
his real life is slowing this process down quite a lot. In a way
it's sad, because years ago there were very few toolkits and had
XForms been open at the time, it took have taken off in a big
way. Now it's being abandoned slowly even by Lyx.
Peter
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