[XBoard-devel] Re: patches

[h.g. muller]

At 16:50 14-12-2009 -0800, Arun Persaud wrote:
> Hi
>
> haven't managed to get to all your patches yet, got about half of them
> into my local git tree. One problem lies with the new file-chooser: we
> would probably need them to sign the copyright notice. But since the
> gtk-version comes with a nice file chooser, perhaps we shouldn't bother
> to include this one and just wait for the gtk-release...

.....

> cheers
>      ARUN

As this concerns a policy matter I want to throw it into the open discussion.

I don't see why we should ask the authors of Ghostview to sign over the
rights on their program to us (= FSF). If Ghostview is already property of
FSF, then fine. But if it is not, this would be a completely out-of-place
request, that I would certainly refuse flat out if I were the Ghostview author.
It is rather like asing Micro-Soft: "well, we compiled XBoard using your
Visual C++ compiler, so now please sign over the copyrights on all libraries
you normally include in that package and that we linked to to us".

I see no logical reason why FSF should own copyrights on files we include
with XBoard that clearly only contain code from the Ghostview project,
with zero copyrightable addition by us. If someone would copy that code,
and use it in violation of the GPL (under which both Ghostview and XBoard
are released), they will have stolen code from Ghostview, and not from
XBoard. So there will be nothing to enforce for us in that case.

In general I am strongly opposed to withholding improvements to XBoard
for silly reasons. If we have a better version, we should release it as quickly
as possible. It might take a year before the gtk version is at the level where
XBoard was in 2001, and we might very well never get there. So waiting
for it while we have smethng that is fit for release immediately is a really
bad idea.