Re: Wesnoth Apple App Store GPL violation?

On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 03:22:05 pm Patrick Parker wrote:
> 
> Hi Rusty,
> Since you are not currently actively involved in Wesnoth development, you may not realize that
there has been some discussion among the developers already, in #wesnoth-dev IRC channel and
several threads on the forums, for example. The existence of iPhone development in particular was
not a secret and has been known for some time now.
> However, I agree that this new FSF GPL issue should have been brought up by now on the developer
mailing list, and that was an oversight which I'm glad has now been corrected. That was a mistake
in my opinion. On the other hand, discussing legal matters in a public format seems risky for those
who aren't legal experts, so maybe you can understand the wariness involved?

Oh absolutely.  This discussion is going to waste a lot of everyone's time,
and I'm dreading it.

> Having said that, I really don't sympathize with your arguments. You essentially are saying that
you want Battle for Wesnoth to be used as a tool in the "Freeness" war against Apple, regardless of
the wishes of the Lead Developer of Wesnoth, the active developers of Wesnoth, or the Wesnoth
userbase itself. To me that seems selfish, not selfless.

I worked on Wesnoth because it was a Free game.  I want to encourage Freeness,
and helping Wesnoth seemed like a good way to do that.  Or, if you prefer,
"a tool in the "Freeness" war".

As to selfish: definitely!  As a coder I want to reduce barriers to accessing
the internals of stuff I use.  Spreading the Freeness meme makes that
increasingly possible.

I realize that others have different priorities, but that's why we have a
license, and a common understanding of what it means.  

> and there was plenty of time to object to it before (but you didn't), I can't help but see this
as anything more than a selfish move on your part right now. If that is really your attitude then I
look forward to seeing your name struck out of the credits.

I definitely regret the delay :(  I knew nothing about Apple's licensing
issues, nor did I follow wesnoth development outside the wesnoth-dev mailing
list.

I apologize if you see this as an attack.  If I believed that compromising on
licensing here helped my selfish goals, I'd support it.

Hope that helps,
Rusty.