Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nano is no longer a GNU project

nano-editor.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 240 posts

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#81

Post by bluejekyll »

thomasahle wrote: post #70
infodroid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, if you contribute to a project for example by sending a patch to it by email or pull request then you agree to be bound by the license. Even if there is no copyright assignment. Otherwise you would not have the right to modify the software to write your patch in the first place. This just seems like common sense to me.

The problem is if the maintainer wants to change the license (Like GPL2 -> GPL3). That's only possible if the contributors have signed over copyright, or the maintainer can track down every person who ever sent a patch, and get them to agree.

I've been struggling with this question as well. If you want to maintain full control of your project, then you want any contributors to assign copyright, because it gives the maintainer the most flexibility.

On the other hand, as happened here, it makes people less likely to want to contribute to the project, because they probably feel like they are being taken advantage of or losing some right.

A counter argument to that, anyone is always free to fork the project, again, what happened here, but this has the obvious undesirable effect of splitting development effort.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#82

Post by sleepybrett »

draw_down wrote: post #26
Already__Taken wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only true if you use vim at least once a week forever. Some people don't want to study a manual to change 1 config line. Call me crazy I know.

Yeah, maybe I'm just weird, but I like it when the down-arrow key makes the cursor go down a line.

Yeah, maybe I'm just weird, but modal editing is kind of a pain unless you do it every day. It's just a little too arcane for making a quick edit to a file in /etc. It's probably even more natural for me having grown up in the shadow of the University of Washington, so PINE was the popular email client and PICO was it's editor.

Don't get me wrong, I've watched Vim power users do amazing things in that editor but those people are not me and I can't find a good reason to climb that particular mountain.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#83

Post by smhenderson »

wtbob wrote: post #55
cdevs wrote: post #45

I just hate when I'm in sublime and I hit ctrl+w to search and it closes the file #fml

For me it's when I'm in Firefox and hit C-s to search and it pops up a save dialogue …

I like that Firefox uses '/' for that like vim/less/etc...

Took me a while to get used to it on Windows, was always reaching for C-f, but once you get used to it it's great!

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#85

Post by busterarm »

thomasahle wrote: post #70
infodroid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, if you contribute to a project for example by sending a patch to it by email or pull request then you agree to be bound by the license. Even if there is no copyright assignment. Otherwise you would not have the right to modify the software to write your patch in the first place. This just seems like common sense to me.

The problem is if the maintainer wants to change the license (Like GPL2 -> GPL3). That's only possible if the contributors have signed over copyright, or the maintainer can track down every person who ever sent a patch, and get them to agree.

The MAME project is an example of the the latter happening successfully.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#86

Post by mikeash »

bechampion wrote: post #2

don't want to sound nasty , but is anyone there using nano really ? i know it come by default in some distros but that's about it really.

Nano is extremely valuable for people learning the system. Typical alternatives are vi and emacs, which are extremely opaque, to the point that it's not even obvious how to exit them. UNIX tutorials will often say "use control-C to kill a command" and then that doesn't even work for this!

Nano tells you how to use it right on the screen. Control-C still doesn't work, but it tells you how to exit. Saving files, paging, cut and paste commands are all shown. There's easily accessible help!

If you're learning UNIX then editing files is handy. Without nano, you'd have to spend a bunch of time learning how to use a text editor before you could do anything that needs text editing.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#87

Post by k__ »

tapiwa wrote: post #25

Loads of us use nano. Simple light editor without the overhead (read learning curve), of all the other big editors. Sure, I might not write code in it, but when I need to edit a conf file or two, both on a server, and my desktop, it really hits the spot.

I use nano, because I didn't "get" Vim.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#88

Post by davexunit »

Annatar wrote: post #84

So happy to read that they are leaving GNU, since presumably that means that the project is ditching the GPL license. Perhaps this will be the first event in a chain reaction of ditching GPL.

(Accidentally upvoted this crappy post.)

No, the project cannot just ditch the license that all of the code has been contributed under. It's still GPL. Your anti-GPL fervor will have to rest for awhile longer.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#89

Post by theandrewbailey »

Nursie wrote: post #27
bechampion wrote: post #2

don't want to sound nasty , but is anyone there using nano really ? i know it come by default in some distros but that's about it really.

Yup, love it. Not as arcane as vim, great for small edits without the oh-crap-what-have-I-pressed-force-quit-start-over phenomenon that I get in vi. 'Serious' editing is done in gedit...

vi makes me angry. This was obvious when I installed Debian on a 1999-era iMac and had to edit (probably) x11 conf and had to use vi with JKL; instead of the arrow keys. It made me want to stab something.

nano makes me happy.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#90

Post by mkesper »

thomasahle wrote: post #70
infodroid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, if you contribute to a project for example by sending a patch to it by email or pull request then you agree to be bound by the license. Even if there is no copyright assignment. Otherwise you would not have the right to modify the software to write your patch in the first place. This just seems like common sense to me.

The problem is if the maintainer wants to change the license (Like GPL2 -> GPL3). That's only possible if the contributors have signed over copyright, or the maintainer can track down every person who ever sent a patch, and get them to agree.

You can also use a Fidiuciary Licence Agreement, like for example KDE: https://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php
Post reply on HN