Re: [Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of The New MH Mail Handling System

[Ken Hornstein]

>nmh is a very nice project and it can be hosted here, but I'm having a hard
>time figuring out whether your project should be approved or not. The problem
>is that the only copyright note I've managed to find (in file COPYRIGHT) says:
>  "Copyright (c) 2000, the authors of nmh
>   All rights reserved."
>but I have failed to find out who "the authors of nmh" are and whether you're
>one of them.

Hm.  Well, that's a fair question, I suppose.  Maybe I could give you some
background as to where we're at, and then we can go from there?

Apparantly over a year ago, Dan Harkless vanished (at least, I believe the
last commit to the CVS tree was March 2001).  Work on nmh stopped.

Around November, a bunch of us on the mailing list decided that "something"
needed to be done.  I ended up being the guy who was willing to do something
about it.

However .... for whatever reason, Doug Morris and I couldn't get ssh working
between my site and his, and he was too busy to really address the problem.
So work on nmh again languished from January until now .... and that's where
we are today.  We've finally decided that the right way to solve the problem
is to move the CVS tree to another site.  That's where we are now.

While I never actually had CVS access (again, long story), I did write a
bunch of code for nmh that made it into the tree via someone else, so I
do consider myself an nmh author, for whatever that's worth.

>The C programs in uip/ do not have any copyright or licensing information
>either. They might as well be proprietary and I could not tell for sure
>(that's why it is important to include licensing information in every file,
>even if they are in the public domain).

Unfortunately ... I believe this dates way back from the original MH.
I can go and research the pedigree of all of those files, if that's what
it takes.

>I know it is an old version that stopped being developped 2 years ago and
>you're trying to reactivate it, which is a very good cause, but we need to
>make sure nobody will complain if you register the project on your name, and
>we also want to avoid this kind of hassle in the future by requesting you to
>include copyright notices and licensing information in all source files.

Well, I believe that the consensus on the mailing list was that _someone_
needed to do something, and I was the one who volunteered.  I don't think
anyone is going to complain.  And I will gladly make sure that one of the
first tasks we do is add copyright notices and licensing info to all of the
source files.

>Could you please register your project again giving us more information (once
>the project gets approved you can make Shantonu Shen --and anybody else you
>want-- a project administrator).

Well .... hmm.  Is there more information than what I've given above that
you need?  If so, I'll gladly try to supply it.

--Ken