Re: GnuTLS in Debian
Clint Adams <clint@debian.org> writes:
> If I recall correctly, similar things were said about freeing Moria and
> Angband, then it turned out that it would have been trivial to contact
> Robert Koeneke if anyone had actually bothered to try.
That doesn't quite match my memory. People did try when the idea first
came up, and were not successful. I'm glad that people were later able to
do so.
This is an interesting example in the context of the OpenSSL and GPL
incompatibility. The relicensing of Angband definitely followed the "good
enough and no one is objecting" principle once the major contributors were
contacted, and I'm fairly sure that not everyone who had touched the
source base formally signed off on the relicensing. For example, I did a
significant update of the in-game command help back in the mid 1990s, and
I suspect the current help continues to be a (now uncredited) derivative
of my work. I don't remember being contacted about this (although to be
fair it's possible it happened and I've forgotten, since I would have said
yes without thinking about it much).
It also helped that Ben had rewritten a large chunk of the source, so in
many cases no one traced history back before him. It's questionable
whether that would hold up to a formal legal challenge, since he didn't do
a clean-room reimplementation.
I fully support the Angband relicensing for the same reason that I would
support linking with OpenSSL if a lawyer says it's okay: I think we worry
too much about this stuff and stand too heavily on technicalities that no
one really cares about.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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