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Nano is no longer a GNU project

nano-editor.org

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Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#151

Post by cm3 »

klakier wrote: post #130
klakier wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know that according to copy rights, open source projects are mess. Nobody tried it in the court, but if some developer contributing to project went to court saying "This part of code is mine, I don't want it to be modified by other people", then the project could be in trouble. Nobody tried that (yet). That's why some OS projects require signing Developer Certificates of Origin etc.

What I meant here, is not that GPL was not tested in court. Just imagine situation of one of the authors saying: I no longer want to see my code on the Internet. Let's say he contributed 30% of the code. Now what? He is the author, he has the right to do it. In most cases developers sign no agreements when their patches are merged.

I don't fully understand. You cannot take back your public contribution, just as you cannot ask the patent office to erase the patent from all records and have everyone aware of it forget about it, and remove each and all references that build on that patent.

The world would be a much different place if smart people in the past hadn't invented Copyright and Patenting, which both are mostly being misused and are not used to foster innovation. Back then it was normal to hold onto secrets and patents and copyright were invented to incentivize publication under well-defined and not too long exclusivity periods after which other can freely improve on it. But today we have 20 year patent monopolies and Disney copyright absurdity.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#152

Post by chris_7 »

infodroid wrote: post #113
zx2c4 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about the politics involved, and I don't even use nano (vim guy myself), but I just ran this out of curiosity: zx2c4@thinkpad ~/nano $ git shortlog -sne --since '3 years ago' 1298 Benno Schulenberg 64 Chris Allegretta 6 Jordi Mallach 3 Mike Frysinger 3 Mike Scalora 2 Rishabh Dave Seems like Benno is clearly the driving force behind the project.

Was it really necessary to also publish their email addresses? -- Edit: I know the addresses appear in the Git repo. But they are not accessible to web crawlers over HTTP. Most code hosting services require a login to see them as a spam control measure. Which is also why I think they should be obfuscated at least.

For whom is spam actually a problem? Filters are absurdly good.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#153

Post by bluejekyll »

cm3 wrote: post #144
infodroid wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point is to choose someone that you believe will make appropriate licensing decisions, both now and in the future. And that requires trust in the copyright holder. You cannot perfectly guarantee they will always do the right thing. But the legal structure of the organization can often reduce the risk of that.

I mostly agree, but unlike other legal agreements, contributing to a project under a FOSS license is not usually coupled with an expiry date after which there's room for radical re-licensing.

This is a really great point. Should there be a pay-to-play portion on these, e.g. Your copyright will "expire" and revert to the project(?) Should you not commit changes for a period of 2 years.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#154

Post by hundchenkatze »

infodroid wrote: post #113
zx2c4 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about the politics involved, and I don't even use nano (vim guy myself), but I just ran this out of curiosity: zx2c4@thinkpad ~/nano $ git shortlog -sne --since '3 years ago' 1298 Benno Schulenberg 64 Chris Allegretta 6 Jordi Mallach 3 Mike Frysinger 3 Mike Scalora 2 Rishabh Dave Seems like Benno is clearly the driving force behind the project.

Was it really necessary to also publish their email addresses? -- Edit: I know the addresses appear in the Git repo. But they are not accessible to web crawlers over HTTP. Most code hosting services require a login to see them as a spam control measure. Which is also why I think they should be obfuscated at least.

They are accessible over HTTP. http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/nano.git/commit/?id=115aeda...

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#155

Post by infodroid »

hundchenkatze wrote: post #154
infodroid wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it really necessary to also publish their email addresses? -- Edit: I know the addresses appear in the Git repo. But they are not accessible to web crawlers over HTTP. Most code hosting services require a login to see them as a spam control measure. Which is also why I think they should be obfuscated at least.

They are accessible over HTTP. http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/nano.git/commit/?id=115aeda...

I did not know that about Savannah. I am mainly familiar with Github, Bitbucket and Launchpad. I guess there is no point hiding from the bots these days.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#156

Post by _kst_ »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #108
zx2c4 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about the politics involved, and I don't even use nano (vim guy myself), but I just ran this out of curiosity: zx2c4@thinkpad ~/nano $ git shortlog -sne --since '3 years ago' 1298 Benno Schulenberg 64 Chris Allegretta 6 Jordi Mallach 3 Mike Frysinger 3 Mike Scalora 2 Rishabh Dave Seems like Benno is clearly the driving force behind the project.

With a record like that I think he should be allowed to do whatever he pleases with the project.

Of course he can do anything he pleases with nano. (So can you, and so can I.) He just doesn't get to do anything he pleases with GNU nano.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#157

Post by cm3 »

willnorris wrote: post #150
cm3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if a or the driving force of a project takes things elsewhere, the users will eventually follow. If the disagreement was over GNU's insistence to require assigning copyright to the FSF, then I can fully understand the reluctance. It's the same reason many contributors cannot officially submit patches to side projects of Google employees, Ubuntu projects, etc.

Just to be clear on this, Google projects (including side projects of Google employees) do not require copyright assignment in the way that FSF projects to. They require an explicit copyright license , but the author retains the copyright. Full details at https://cla.developers.google.com/about

Interesting, thanks for the correction.

Reading that page, it appears that this due to US IP ownership agreements for employees. Is that correct?

If so, why isn't there an exception for personal-time-only contributions by single developers, or at least those outside a jurisdiction like the US where an employer may own each and all of your ideas and intellectual output? To be clear, I haven't lived or worked in the US, so this is all foreign and weird to me.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#158

Post by abetusk »

dangrossman wrote: post #24

> > As you know, I will not assign my copyright to the FSF, > > nor to anyone else. All the code I write is GPL'ed. > > You don't need to own the copyright on any code in > > order to be able to enforce the GPL. [...] > Indeed, and in fact for a long time the copyright > was owned by me before it was assigned to the FSF. > It's not required per se, but generally speaking, > there must be a Maintainer of the Software…

I'm confused. The reason the FSF gives for copyright assignment is precisely in aid of their legal enforcement of the GPL. From their website [1]:

    ... enforcement of copyright is generally not possible 
    for distributors: only the copyright holder or someone 
    having assignment of the copyright can enforce the
    license.
    ...
[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#159

Post by dpark »

mikegerwitz wrote: post #43

I'm on the GNU maintainers team; I want to clarify a couple things about this: First, Nano has _not_ left the GNU project; GNU Nano still does and will continue to exist. The current maintainer of GNU Nano---Chris Allegretta---was hoping to add Benno Schulenberg as a co-maintainer, citing numerous contributions by him. Unfortunately, Benno refused to accept GNU's maintainership agreement, and so was not appointed. Be…

Why doesn't Chris just go update the website to clarify this? Surely Benno isn't the only one with access to change the site. Even if so, the domain is registered to Chris.
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