Ion3 license violation

[Peter Jeremy]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 07:59:34PM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote:
>On 2007-12-12, Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
>> It's impossible for the FreeBSD ports system to guarantee compliance with
>> his arbitrarily chosen "28 days" rule.  
>
>There is no "28 days" rule. There is a "latest release in 28 days or
>prominently mark (potentially) obsolete" rule.

I'm not sure how me as an end user not bothering to update my
installed package for several months differs from me as a package
distributor failing to update a binary distribution to your latest
release within 28 days,

If your intent is to stop people potentially running superceded code
then maybe _you_ need to take some responsibility for this.  If you
bother to look at the top of your Xorg log, you will find something
like the following (older versions of XFree86 included explicit dates
for validity).  Maybe you should do something similar.
X.Org X Server 1.4.0
Release Date: 5 September 2007
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: FreeBSD 7.0-BETA2 i386 
Current Operating System: FreeBSD ...
Build Date: 04 November 2007  09:16:33PM
 	Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
	to make sure that you have the latest version.

> You can make the marking
>permanent, always requiring users to acknowledge a message. You can 
>make the marking automatic, by checking the website for a new release
>(as Debian presently does), or by some more sophisticated means or dead
>man triggers.

Feel free to submit patches.

> You may not be able to distribute such binary packages 
>with your present setup, but source should be enough.

In general, FreeBSD only distributes third-party packages in binary format.

> You may even 
>simply have the package download and install
>
>        http://iki.fi/tuomov/dl/ion-3-latest.tar.gz

How will this work if the end user does not have web access or doesn't
have the resources or desire to compile it?

>(signature in http://iki.fi/tuomov/dl/ion-3-latest.tar.gz.asc).

This signature was created using a self-signed key and is therefore
useless as a mechanism to verify the associated package.  There is no
way to verify that the person who created that signature is the same
person who wrote the e-mail I am responding to or that either are
actually the author of the "official" version of Ion-3.

>not about the days. The greatest difficulty to complying with the 
>license are the idealist blockages in your head.

You are free to use whatever license you desire for software that you
write.  The harder your license is to comply with, the less likely it
is that people will comply with it - either they will ignore the
license or they will not use the software.  The FreeBSD Project takes
license issues seriously and, since you refused to assist the Project
in complying with your license, the Project had no alternative but to
remove your software.  I'd suggest that you are the one with "the
idealist blockages in your head."

-- 
Peter Jeremy
Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement
an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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