On Sep 5, 2007, at 4:43 PM, Edward Welbourne wrote:
Steffen:For a closed source release it would be lovely if you had a Debian developer amongst your Opera developers who can upload packages to the distribution.That's one of the (too many) things I've got on my todo list - get myself trained as a proper Debian developer. For the moment, I just have some scripts (mostly inherited, I've only had time to clean them up so far) that do the packaging mostly right; the scripts know more about Debian packaging than I do, though. Tollef Fog Heen directed me to http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/ when he was my Ubuntu contact, so I guess I should familiarize myself with that before asking for a sponsor ! Eddy.
IANDD, but I work with the debian-perl packaging team, mostly creating havoc in their subversion repository. :)
I am willing to help packaging Opera because I think it might help persuade the powers that be that the Free Software ecosystem is good for software in general and that using a Free Software license for software can add to its quality and increase profits for the company that writes it.
I do have reservations though, it would be nice to know that there is consideration of Free Software licensing for Opera's desktop browser. Frankly I do not see how the GPL or similar license could negatively impact the market prospects for Opera as nearly every browser is already under a Free Software license. (I'm thinking of Web-Kit and Firefox, of course IE is an exception but you do not want to be associated with them. ;^) ) I agree with others on this list who state that there is little point helping closed source software and I could not contribute to a closed source project if it were going to remain closed.
I live in Gothenburg Sweden, quite near the headquarters of Opera in Oslo, and you have a development team here in Gothenburg if I am not mistaken - perhaps we could meet and talk about packaging issues?
Also there is going to be a Free Software conference in Gothenburg, perhaps Opera is interested in attending / participating (if you or someone from Opera is not already)? We have an exciting roster of speakers lined up with some interesting people from the Free Software world and the entire conference is partly sponsored by the Free Software Foundation Europe. I'll relate more to your email address when the press release is out if you wish, don't want people mad at me for advertising on this list. :)
Apologies in advance if this mail is off-topic, which it largely appears to be. I will continue any thread that is not germane off list.
Kind regards, Jeremiah Foster jeremiah@jeremiahfoster.com --- Key fingerprint = 9616 2AD3 3AE0 502C BD75 65ED BDC3 0D44 2F5A E672