You probably remember that I’m not one to fall in line with the Free Software Foundation — a different story goes for the FSFe which I support and I look forward for the moment when I can come back as a supporter; for the moment I’m afraid that I have to contribute only as a developer.
Well, it seems like more people are joining in the club. After Werner complained about the handling of GNU copyright assignments – not much after my covering of Gentoo’s assignments which should probably make those suggesting a GNUish approach to said copyright assignment think a lot – Nikos of GnuTLS decided to split off the GNU project.
Why did Nikos decide this? Well, it seems like the problem is that both Werner and Nikos are tired of the secrecy in the GNU project and even more of the inability to discuss, even in a private setting, some topics because they are deemed taboo by the FSF, in the person of Richard Stallman.
So, Nikos decided to move the lists, source code and website on its own hosting, and then declared GnuTLS no longer part of the GNU project. Do you think that this would have put the FSF in a “what are we doing wrong?” mood? Hah, naïve are you! Indeed the response from the FSF (in the person of Richard Stallman, see a pattern?) was to tell Nikos (who wrote, contributed to GNU, and maintained the project) that he can’t take his own project and take it out of GNU, and that if he wants he can resign from the maintainer’s post.
Well, now it seems like we might end up with a “libreTLS” package, as Nikos is open to renaming the project… it’s going to be quite a bit of a problem I’d say, if anything because I want to track Nikos’s development more than GNU’s, and thus I would hope for the “reverse fork” from the GNU project to just die off. Considering I also had to sign the assignment paperwork (and in the time that said paperwork was being handled, I lost time/motivation for the contributions I had in mind, lovely isn’t it?).
Well, what this makes very clear to me is that I still don’t like the way the GNU project, and the FSF are managed, and that my respect for Stallman’s behaviour is, once again, zero.