On Wed, 7 Mar 2007, Eduardo Chappa wrote:

*** Asheesh Laroia ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote today:

:) Eduardo, I see that you have an Alpine Maildir patch at
:) http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/alpine/info/maildir.html .  Do you
:) have any comment as to if it's suitable to include it into the Debian
:) Alpine package?

Dear Assheesh,

 Thank you for your message. To be honest, I do not know the answer to
your question, in terms of the following issues.

 * I do not have knowledge of anybody testing it in "pure" debian. I know
   some people have tried it in things like potato, etc. They even
   distribute it. So, I do not know how well it works in Debian, or if it
   needs a special tuning.

That's something I can look into; don't worry about the Debian-specific customizations, if any, that may be needed. (I doubt any will be.)

 * I do not know if Debian would force me to distribute my patch under a
   specific license. I myself do not care what people do with the patch
   as long as they don't claim ownership. I am happy to provide support
   for it. I just don't want it to be under an imposed license.

As the package maintainer, it's my responsibility to make sure that Debian distributes only code that is legal to distribute (and that is Free Software). We would not claim ownership, and I would make it clear in the documentation that it includes your Maildir patch.

 * I am the author of the patch. It is based on old versions of the patch
   (e.g. the one Debian distributes, or Suse used to distribute), but it
   is completely different now. It has so many ways to configure it. The
   one thing it is missing is UID support for IMAP. This is a big
   shortcoming, in my opinion, and I am working on it. Having said this,
   for local access it is great. The patch that Debian distributes has
   UID support, but lacks other features and it is very unstable.

:) It seems that the washington.edu have reasons of correctness against
:) writing their own.  Also, do you know if the author of this Maildir
:) patch is willing to allow Debian to redistribute his patch under the
:) Apache License 2.0?

As far as my reading of the license goes, all I ask about license is
compatible and allowed under the Apache 2.0 License; but I do not want my
work to be under such license.

Because we'll be distributing copies of the patch, I want to make sure that we are allowed to. You seem to have said that (a) the patch is your work (meaning, you also hold the copyright to the work), and (b) that you are willing to allow people to share changes in a fairly liberal way.

I don't understand what you mean by "an imposed license". The great thing about copyright is that you can let different folk use your work under different license terms. This means that if you let us Debian guys use it under an Apache 2.0 license, then later on you want to let other people use your work under some different license, you are allowed to do that. All you can't do is revoke our license.

Does that make sense? It sounds like you'd be happy to let us include the patch, and it sounds like our users would be well-served if we were to. I would be most comfortable if you said, "Asheesh, you are allowed to use and redistribute this patch under the same terms as Alpine," and I hope you understand that saying that doesn't limit your rights to let everyone else use it under even more liberal terms than the Apache 2.0 License that Alpine itself is under.

So how can I get you to say the quoted sentence? (-:

I want to make sure also that you understand that this message represents
my personal opinion and solely my opinion. It is not meant to represent
the opinion of the (Al)Pine team, nor the University of Washington, or the
Department of Mathematics at the University of Washington. I owe in
gratitude to the University of Washington and its people more than I can
repay in any way.

Thanks for making that clear. (-:

-- Asheesh.

--
Q:      What's a WASP's idea of open-mindedness?
A:      Dating a Canadian.


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