Re: Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL

[Philip Thiem <ptt@umr.edu>]

My 2 cents:

If you want it easier for newibes or you want a nice GUI. Consider the
following

1.) Find people argee about having newbie utils and have time.  Debian may
be hard, 
    but I am certain that most of the people the work on it have lives and
work as
    much as they can you need more people that aren't already working on
something. 
    Let debian create most of the substance, and keep things going.  
2.) Create a new set of projects to solve the problems. You don't have to
fork,
    except if some won't let you become developer and they won't let you
take
    up space with a "experimental" destribution.  
3.) Write interfaces for utilities -- good back end programmers are not 
    necessarily good GUI people. visa versa. Plus some people like command
prompts.
    e.g: Apt still needs a good X gui right?
4.) If you want a new help system, make one that will interpret (or
compile) the help       from info files.
5.) For a GUI download the gnome source code. You do want a GUI environment
right?
    See how it does things and come up with something new, or get your
optimization
    people on it and fix it.  Bit by bit.  I'd say let GTK and GNOME worry
about 
    designing it on large scale, and then someone can go back through just
looking at 
    code and tweak it like hell.  
6.) Release it as GPL

As long as you don't heavily get into replacing base utilities with a
'without
choice' vastly different program, but instead add to them,  there shouldn't
be 
any reason why the changes won't be incorporated back into Debian.

The only problem I see is getting offically recognized by Debian since
new-maintainer 
appears SCREWED.  Also, if there is some unforseen political reason within
Debian
you may have to creat a "patch distribution" for debian.  If you didn't
change the
operating dynamics in adding to debian.  You will only have to store 
your new programs and add a couple lines to apt-source.  If you want to
require
packages and create defaults, use a meta package of many depends.

If you think I'm being anal, feel free to enlist my help, I not starting
any projects right now because I don't have enough time, but to looking at
code, or writing a bit here and there is do-able. 

-- 
Philip Thiem /---/ ptt@umr.edu /---/ Pass on the GAS get NASM instead
    Computer Science & Mathematics Undergraduate @ UM-Rolla
    Interests: Security, Operating Systems, Numerical Computing,
               Algorithm Analysis, Discrete/Linear/Modern Algebra,