situation of imapsync and Debian (was: Re: Bug#609845: huge memory leak when syncing large mailboxes) (original) (raw)

Hi guys,

Executive summary for new recipients (debian-legal): imapsync has changed its distribution policy, downloads from the author's original website are not free (as in beer) anymore. Of course apt-get source' or apt-get install' is still free, as the package is still in the Debian archive. The licensing hasn't changed, Debian's distribution of the package is still legal. As the maintainer of the package, I am starting discussion about the future of this package in the archive.

Details:

Sorry for hijacking this thread for license/distribution discussions, but I guess this is the best way to keep the people notified who are already in this discussion.

On Fri, 14 Jan 2011 06:09:22 +0100, Gilles LAMIRAL gilles.lamiral@laposte.net writes:

So I have no shame about imapsync and won't ever have any.

No shame on either sides. I totally agree: you should have a safe and nice living and you should have enough money to pay for it.

On an orthogonal note, I am not feeling comfortable about dealing with imapsync Debian packaging anymore. It is my (sparse) free time and I would like to commit it to projects that are free (as in speech AND beer) and easily downloadable from the original author without any kind of payment and/or license reading/investigation. Please accept my decision about this. Thanks for all the time in the past you have spent on discussing with me, dealing with Debian stuff.

I do not have the legal skills to discuss wether your webpage and your distribution policy of imapsync (http://www.linux-france.org/prj/imapsync/) is compatible or not with the debian social contract. I will leave this to the debian-legal people.

Now imapsync doesn't have a debian maintainer anymore, so we will have to look for a new one. You can read about the Debian process for this at http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/. Of course the upstream author's opinion is very important to us, so Gilles, let me ask you a few questions:

If it is needed, I am happy to contact the ftp masters to make any necessary deletion from the Debian archive as quickly as possible.

Thanks again for working with us and I wish you good luck with your business around imapsync and/or other projects.

Gergely

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