I'm sick of distributions providing ancient development snapshots, that
their lusers think is the latest, and come crying to me about. Since
Debian appears to refuse [1,2] to remove the ancient Ion3 development
snapshot that they have (20061223, the last release with totally broken
Xinerama support) from the new static (so called "stable") distribution,
I will be refusing to deal with the average Debian luser, just like I
can't be bothered to deal with the average Gentoo luser. Sucks though
that already filtering out these lusers from the complaining masses is
a lot of work. Sucks that the first question to everyone must be "which
version and distro you're using" -- and it's usually the people who've
installed Ion from a distribution, that are using old unsupported
development snapshots. (Actually, maybe I should just stop supporting
anyone who has not installed Ion from the official tarball. Let the
distros support their own lusers.)
I'm also considering extending the license (LGPL) with a "Distributor
timely response clause", something like the following (D). It could
make Ion "non-free", but I don't care about these idealists' definitions
of freeness.
D. Anyone distributing Ion3 in aggregate with other works, must
within twenty-eight (28) days from the release of a new version
of Ion3, either (A) upgrade the aggregate to include the new
version, and cause the new version be installed when a user tries
to install an unspecified version of Ion3, or upgrade Ion3 (from the
aggregate); or (B) remove Ion3 from the aggregate, and notify users
of the removal, when they try to upgrade the aggregate or Ion3 (from
the aggregate) and have installed an old version of Ion3. (It is,
however, not necessary to remove Ion3 from the user's computer;
merely notify of its out-datedness.)
The requirements above on responses to user actions do not apply,
if the user is not network-connected, or chooses not to use network
installation, and is using physical distribution media.
This clause does not bind any rebranded derivative works, that can
not be confused with Ion3: that is, any derivative work whose name
can not be confused with "Ion3", and which in in no way points
to the original work or its authors for support, may be distributed
under the LGPL or GPL without this clause.
(Perhaps this should be combined with a clause that forbids
distributors from applying unsupported/unapproved patches...
like Xft... Too bad that due to the nature of Gentoo ebuilds,
it probably doesn't work against them.)
Too bad that Ion3 is going into a freeze too soon, so that the
benefit of the clause would be minimal, as it doesn't work
retroactively. But if that wasn't the case, I'd certainly add it.
I'm sick of sloppy distributors and mega-frozen distributions,
and the lusers who think they're using the latest version because
of them.
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=413469
[2] http://www.inittab.de/blog/debian/20070305_giving-away-ion-packages.html
--
Tuomo
