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On Saturday 16 October 2004 9:33 pm, M.Blackmore wrote:
Perhaps (and it won't be I, due to lack of energy/health) it would be a good idea to set a few people who want to help Free s/w (writ broadly) to examine licences for stuff on servers with an eye to backstopping licence changes.
So many projects! Instead, I think we'll have to rely on those who are already interested in the project being alert to the options, or at least knowing about people who can help. As with this one, Robin was the interested party and by sounding off here, it brought in the help that was needed. However, the task can be reduced to those packages not already mirrored by major free software distributions - the source is already mirrored all over the world and, like Perl, is impossible to repeal once it's included in something like Debian. Any change in licence of a Debian package is likely to attract significant attention. It's the quieter, smaller, packages that need watching. One idea might be for anyone interested to simply browse Berlios http://developer.berlios.de/ or SourceForge for small projects that hold the interest. Download the source code and just check back to those pages from time to time. Remember, some projects just die for lack of support or time. There's no point in recovering every single project out there, some will die because the code is simply junk! To that extent, SOME kind of programming critique is required. There are some quite active projects that contain awful code and some very quiet projects that contain very useful code.
That wouldn't require technical programming skills, which I for one lack of any relevance (last bit of code I wrote commercially was the mid 80s!!) but a keen eye for the small print and enough wit to know what they are looking at and the relevance of the project.
True. You need a keen eye for details in the licence and a good understanding of the GPL and compatible licences. Remember that once something IS GPL, it's only the lack of a download site that can prevent it remaining available to the free software community. As this example showed, this also holds up for most open source and some non OSI compatible licences.
Possibly once identified and clarified from the licence arrangements, all such stuff could be "banked" around various places
First step is to download copies locally. This is where you are likely to have the largest amount of free space. When something happens, then you already have the code to replace the site.
, so things just can't be disappeared in this way when a developer simply un-publics (again so to speak) something.
This doesn't happen often though - I would be tempted to investigate some automated way of monitoring certain packages. A little Perl should do the job. Anyone got the time? -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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