Quasar (was Re: Status on NPO Accounting project: Conservancy seeks a contractor to begin work)

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Marc Paré wrote at 05:19 (EDT):
> As far as the license not being revocable, at the time, the Quasar
> devs wrote to the community that they were no longer going to develop
> code for the GPL'd version, 

That's good, at least they didn't attempt to say rights under GPL
weren't still available.

> I would have to ask them again why they quit producing their GPL'd
> version, and, am not sure if they just restarted all the code form
> scratch. [(a)]

Well, rewriting from scratch is one option for doing this.  They had
other options, too: (b) never accepted any patches on the GPL version to
the canonical codebase, (c) always kept patches separated out so that
the core remained 100% their copyright, or (d) required ©AA/CLA on all
incorporated contributions.

Hopefully they did one of those four things.  Otherwise, they've
violated the GPL.

> It would seem to me that, taking a step back, there could be room for
> negotiating good relationship with the Quasar devs and trying to come
> to some kind of mutually beneficial relationship.

Perhaps so -- although, is there any reason to believe their code base
is miles above the many other codebases out there of this type?  I'm
reluctant to burn time trying to get a codebase liberated that isn't
uniquely suited. 

> Yes, I agree with the first part of your comment, but I don't believe
> their intent is to "sully the good name of Linux" as they actually
> will produce binaries of different Linux distros of Quasar

This reminds me of the classic "isn't it great that Oracle ported to
GNU/Linux finally?" discussions back in the early 2000's.  You can guess
what side of that debate I was on.  I think this part of the discussion
is probably off-topic.  It's my fault; I'm sorry for bringing it up in
the first place, since my off-hand comment about that was indeed off the
topic of this list. :)
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy