Hello Sebastian, * Sebastian Pipping wrote on Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 08:50:01AM CET: > > If the FSF handles this problem also putting out a > non-alpha-non-beta 1.11 release of Automake before > 2008-02-01 I will donate k Euros to the FSF with k equal > the number of days left to that deadline
Your announcement of a donation honors you. Let me address two parts of this equation: First, the lawyering work. I don't have a lot of influence on the progress there, but I do know that work has going on right before the holidays; witnessed by some clarification questions from the FSF licensing issues engineer. Second, wrt. to Automake releases: I would have no problem doing a 1.10.1 very soon, using GPLv2+, which however installs the GPLv3 COPYING file into new packages (automake -a), and which has the lzma patch from master. And yes, FSF-wise there seems to be no problem with doing a GPLv2+ release of the autotools, exactly because of this licensing holdup. For 1.11, however, besides the licensing issue it needs work, and this is where you could help much more effectively than with a donation: somebody needs to test the current code on several systems, and with some packages out there. The vala patches need review, and ideally the mono ones, too; except that AFAIK they still need a copyright assignment. The larger issue here is that since Alexandre left, there is basically no official Automake maintainer, and I have little time, and it will not be more in the near future. Increasing that time is simply not an option for me, and not a function of monetary flow in whatever direction. So what is needed is a new maintainer, or at least somebody who can help out. Cheers, Ralf
