Ignoring author's explicit wish

Posted Sep 2, 2004 8:30 UTC (Thu) by kamil (guest, #3802)
In reply to: Free software survives the original copyright holder by gdt
Parent article: Pointless ideology?

And what of the moral aspects of ignoring the author's explicit wish? Free software has moral objectives, so moral considerations are important.

Fair enough, but what about the users who paid for the camera, and want to use it?

It might not be the nicest thing to do to ignore the author's wish, but ignoring the clear interests of the users sounds a lot worse to me.

If you release something under GPL, you lose complete control over the code. If you don't like it, don't release under GPL in the first place.

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Ignoring author's explicit wish

Posted Sep 2, 2004 13:30 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

>Fair enough, but what about the users who paid for the camera, and want to
>use it?

They are also free to pay for someone to support the product for them or use another OS. There is a 'price' to using Linux.. if you dont like that price find an OS that meets your bill better.

People seem to have missed the various parts where Greg said, you are free to take the code.. fix the broken bits and resubmit it.. just be prepared to maintain it. [or they did see it and just dont want to maintain it.]

Ignoring author's explicit wish

Posted Sep 2, 2004 15:08 UTC (Thu) by kamil (guest, #3802) [Link] (1 responses)

I basically agree with what you're saying.

The only problem is, that what you're saying is off-topic for this particular thread. Go read the posting #100434 I was replying to. I basically disagreed with the notion that if an author of a GPL software "withdraws" it, we should all obey. It might be a polite thing to do, but polite is not necessarily the same as right.

Ignoring author's explicit wish

Posted Sep 2, 2004 20:05 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

He was also the maintainer of a device driver, and he wanted a change to it applied. As his change doesn't cause problems for any other code, it gets applied, obviously. If someone else wants to take over maintainership, they can, and, since the old driver was under the GPL, they can base their driver on it. They should probably name it something different, though, because it won't behave as users expect (i.e., pwcx won't load). In fact, they should arrange it such that decompression can be done in userspace like is generally considered correct.