On 30.06.17 16:25, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote: > Starting with a vanilla mutt tarball and adding a set of patches, broken > out by bug fix or feature, is fairly standard practice. It's easy to > see what is changed, and I think is still fair to call mutt. > > If you take a vanilla mutt tarball and add a 30k+ line "blob patch" > called "neomutt", I don't think it's fair to call that mutt anymore. > > If you don't even package a vanilla mutt tarball, but take the tarball > from a completely different project, it most definitely is not mutt. > > I think it comes down to accountability. If you know the changes you > are making, then there is something of a guarantee the result is a > *Debian* packaged version of *Mutt*. Debian may have made some changes, but > is vouching that this is essentially Mutt, plus changes they comprehend > and can vouch for. > > By switching out the tarball to someone something generated by another > project, or adding a ginormous "blob patch", Mutt can not and should not > vouch for it. You are relying on the other project's reputation, not > ours. It is then completely inappropriate for you to call it mutt. > It's not mutt. It's not "mutt + neomutt". It's neomutt. > > > I don't believe that your work is lost, all your code ends up in > > Debian (and derivatives) and yes there will be patches on the top of > > it. > > Perhaps lost was the wrong word. The code may be mixed in, but as Mutt > project maintainer, the package has nothing to do with my work anymore. > The package you are calling "mutt" is not something I've helped create. > Your version "1.8.3+blah" is not even remotely the code I decided should > be in version "1.8.3". It's code the NeoMutt project made the decision > on. Is it that hard to understand why calling it mutt upsets me?
Looking in /usr/local/src/mutt-1.8.0/COPYRIGHT, I see a long history of copyright assertion: Copyright (C) 1996-2016 Michael R. Elkins <m...@cs.hmc.edu> Copyright (C) 1996-2002 Brandon Long <bl...@fiction.net> Copyright (C) 1997-2009 Thomas Roessler <roess...@does-not-exist.org> Copyright (C) 1998-2005 Werner Koch <w...@isil.d.shuttle.de> Copyright (C) 1999-2014 Brendan Cully <bren...@kublai.com> Copyright (C) 1999-2002 Tommi Komulainen <tommi.komulai...@iki.fi> Copyright (C) 2000-2004 Edmund Grimley Evans <edmu...@rano.org> Copyright (C) 2006-2009 Rocco Rutte <pd...@gmx.net> Copyright (C) 2014-2016 Kevin J. McCarthy <ke...@8t8.us> and a GPL2 assertion. IME, while that permits derivative works, it does not permit a derivative work to purport to be the copyrighted original work. Misrepresenting the "debneomutt" work as "mutt" would seem to clearly contravene the asserted and enforcible licence. We pay our FOSS benefactors only in respect and correct attribution. To fail to do so is IP theft and or misrepresentation, I contend, and is dishonest and intolerably reprehensible. It reflects appallingly on the debian distribution. It needs to be rectified immediately. Erik
