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

Hi,

I have been using ion for 2 years, thanks for the great work :)
I must admit I recently switched to dwm, which is a really light wm.

I still use riot, waiting for any new improvements!

Lobzang

On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 02:02 -0800, Michael Vanier wrote:

> 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
> >