ac>> It contains a lot of code not written by me that was 
 ac>> released to the public domain.  The licencing could not 
 ac>> change without permission from all of those people.

 > Maybe I'm missing your point, and maybe I need to dig deaper....

 > But from memory:  (1)  The Husky project is ending 
 > up in the "non-free" 
 > arena for Debian due to licensing because they use SMAPI.

 ac> This is news to me, but doesn't bother me terribly 
 ac> much, epecially since I don't use Debian.  As far as 
 ac> I'm concerned the MSGAPI code has always been "open 
 ac> source" (since 1991).  SMAPI may be freely modified, 
 ac> and does not cost anything to use, so I'm not sure what 
 ac> the issue is there.

Ok.  Thanks.  Maybe I took something I read out of context....

 > (2)  I admit I need to dig out and look at what the current license
 > is, but I suspect the non-public domain portions of the code can be
 > modified over to GPL, since as I understand it, the code is either
 > Scott's original code or changes that were made in the public domain.
 > Therefor, if you switch over to the Max 3.02 source release set of
 > code and make the same public domain mods to that code,

 ac> Unfortunately you are underestimating the number of 
 ac> mods there have been to XMSGAPI since SQDEV200.  It's 
 ac> not just a matter of a patch here or there.  Virtually 
 ac> the entire code has changed or been rearranged in a way 
 ac> to make it very difficult to do as you suggest.  If I 
 ac> had the time, I may do it, but as I said in my previous 
 ac> message I'm more interested in getting the code stable 
 ac> than making the Debian people happy.

Ah...  Ok...

And yes, getting the code stable is more important...

 > your new code should be able to go in Debian's regular tree, and
 > thereby get included on the standard Debian CD images.....  Would
 > that not be a good goal to strive for? What am I missing in this
 > line of thought?

 ac> I don't really care whether it appears on CD images or 
 ac> not personally.  Anyone wanting to use it can download 
 ac> the source code from my web server, which will always 
 ac> have the latest version, unlike a CD.

Eventually as the code matures, it would be good to be able to install 
fidonet based technologies on the various Linux platforms using those
platforms install tools....  I agree this isn't for initial development,
but long term you need to consider it.

Thanks for the discussion.  I need to move on to other items now.

Take care.....

Bob Jones, 1:343/41


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