Re: Debian sucks // Ion may become (DFSG-) "non-free"

As everyone knows, real Ion users compile from source ;-)  If you need a distro 
to manage Ion installation, maybe you should consider some other WM...?

BTW thanks for a great window manager.  Now I'm ruined forever; all the other 
WMs have so much eye candy I feel like I'm going to go into insulin shock 
whenever I try them.

Mike

Tuomo Valkonen wrote:
> I'm sick of distributions providing ancient development snapshots, that
> their lusers think is the latest, and come crying to me about. Since
> Debian appears to refuse [1,2] to remove the ancient Ion3 development
> snapshot that they have (20061223, the last release with totally broken
> Xinerama support) from the new static (so called "stable") distribution,
> I will be refusing to deal with the average Debian luser, just like I 
> can't be bothered to deal with the average Gentoo luser. Sucks though 
> that already filtering out these lusers from the complaining masses is
> a lot of work. Sucks that the first question to everyone must be "which
> version and distro you're using" -- and it's usually the people who've 
> installed Ion from a distribution, that are using old unsupported 
> development snapshots. (Actually, maybe I should just stop supporting
> anyone who has not installed Ion from the official tarball. Let the 
> distros support their own lusers.)
> 
> I'm also considering extending the license (LGPL) with a "Distributor
> timely response clause", something like the following (D). It could
> make Ion "non-free", but I don't care about these idealists' definitions
> of freeness.
> 
>   D. Anyone distributing Ion3 in aggregate with other works, must
>      within twenty-eight (28) days from the release of a new version
>      of Ion3, either (A) upgrade the aggregate to include the new
>      version, and cause the new version be installed when a user tries
>      to install an unspecified version of Ion3, or upgrade Ion3 (from the
>      aggregate); or (B) remove Ion3 from the aggregate, and notify users
>      of the removal, when they try to upgrade the aggregate or Ion3 (from
>      the aggregate) and have installed an old version of Ion3. (It is,
>      however, not necessary to remove Ion3 from the user's computer;
>      merely notify of its out-datedness.)
> 
>      The requirements above on responses to user actions do not apply,
>      if the user is not network-connected, or chooses not to use network
>      installation, and is using physical distribution media.
> 
>      This clause does not bind any rebranded derivative works, that can
>      not be confused with Ion3: that is, any derivative work whose name
>      can not be confused with "Ion3", and which in in no way points
>      to the original work or its authors for support, may be distributed
>      under the LGPL or GPL without this clause.
> 
> (Perhaps this should be combined with a clause that forbids 
> distributors from applying unsupported/unapproved patches... 
> like Xft... Too bad that due to the nature of Gentoo ebuilds, 
> it probably doesn't work against them.)
> 
> Too bad that Ion3 is going into a freeze too soon, so that the
> benefit of the clause would be minimal, as it doesn't work
> retroactively. But if that wasn't the case, I'd certainly add it.
> I'm sick of sloppy distributors and mega-frozen distributions, 
> and the lusers who think they're using the latest version because
> of them.
> 
>   [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=413469
> 
>   [2] http://www.inittab.de/blog/debian/20070305_giving-away-ion-packages.html
>