Re: [XBoard-devel] Re: xboard/winboard maintenance

[h.g. muller]

At 12:56 22-5-2009 -0700, Tim Mann wrote:
.....
> I'm still not doing any work on the project but am at least trying to
> stay out of the way.  I discussed stepping down as maintainer with
> Arun, but he didn't want to take over.  However, I'd be happy to give
> up that title to H. G. or Arun (or anyone they would nominate) if they
> want to take it on.
> ....
>         --Tim

Since my name is mentioned here, perhaps I should comment on this.

I do have a long-term commitment to XBoard / WinBoard, or I would have not
started my own fork. I have never been part of a multi-person programming
project like this, however, and I have no idea what exeactly the tasks of an
official maintainer encompass. I am usually pretty poor at administrative 
duties,
out of disinterest.

I am also still a bit skeptical as to the advantage for making the savannah
site the new home for 'my' fork, compared to the way I have been doing things
so far. (i.e. plodding long on my own, and distributing the releases from the
WinBoard forum). One major problem I see is the policy to require copyright
transfer to the FSF of all contributed code. You did not mention any names,
but if the copyrght-transfer problem you mentoned pertains to Allessandro,
the Savannah project is pretty much dead, as is contribution is truly 
essential.

Releasing the way I was used to would not suffer from this restriction; the GPL
pretty much makes it immaterial who owns the copyright of the code. Perhaps
unles you want to force derivative works by others to open up their sources,
which I don't care about. Not having to worry about copyright transfers makes
life a lot easier...

So I was really waiting for the Savannah XBoard project to prove their 
continued
usefulness, by being able to fully absorb my most recent version, before 
deciding
about  making any commitments to it.

I hope this clarifies my stance on this.

H.G.