Jimmy Johnson writes:
>
> > If Warren still hasn't released his tools under a Free license, I
> > would question the statement that Warren has given plenty to the
> > community.
>
> He gave his life savings to the development of Mepis and is now
> living hand to mouth, what else do you want, maybe he should bleed
> for you. What have you done but judge others?
>
I didn't mean to imply that there was anything wrong with what Warren
has accomplished with Mepis. It's a fantastic distro, without
question, and without it I may not have been able to switch from
Windows to Linux.
But for a long time, it was impossible for the developers of any other
distro to build on his work because of the license he was using. That
meant that he had created a new community of Mepis users (Mepis
lovers, more accurately!), and for those people he did indeed provide
a great service. But until he released his code under an Apache
license, which I now understand he did last year, he was not
contributing to the Debian or Ubuntu communities.
> Tyler, the tools are hardly more than a scripts that have been
> wrapped in a GUI, I think you blow this thing way out of proportion
> and you are not very constructive.
The issue I was addressing was why Debian has not incorporated these
tools. In that instance, it doesn't matter at all if they are simple
scripts or massive binaries. The only thing that matters is if they
are available under a free software license. When I last used Mepis,
they weren't.
I did some more searching, and I see that Warren has indeed released
his tools under an Apache license. That's fantastic news, and I hope
his work does make it's way into Debian.
Cheers,
Tyler