Free software survives the original copyright holder

Posted Sep 2, 2004 11:56 UTC (Thu) by Fats (guest, #14882)
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.
To me the most disappointing aspect has been the shoddy treatment of the author. It hardly encourages participation in the Linux kernel community.

The author should not have released it's software as GPL in the first place then. He should have thought about it before commiting. When you are commiting code to the linux kernel you have to be aware that your code becomes part of the kernel and some patches may be accepted that you don't like. If you can't accept that don't code in GPL.

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Free software survives the original copyright holder

Posted Sep 2, 2004 13:01 UTC (Thu) by fjf33 (guest, #5768) [Link]

I think the author was more worried about having to deal with all the email and support coming from people that cannot make the camera work. Because without the compression the camera is very crippled.

In hindsight, if he was not trying to make a statement, he should have supplied a patch that removes it from the kernel and be quiet about it. Put a note that he is not maintaining it anymore and leave it at that.