Thanks (really!)

[Zbigniew Łuszpiński]

> Zbigniew Łuszpiński wrote:
> > I mean author rights. If I explained it wrong - sorry. Lunar is LGPLv2
> > licensed so modules and other pieces of digital work in it.
>
> One thing is arguably copyrightable: modules. Even though you write a
> module yourself, there is no way you can claim copyright over it
> directly. I'd love to give everyone credit but in all honesty it makes no
> sense: your module is a derivative work of both the original authors
> package (who wrote the INSTALL file which exacly describes the way to
> build a package) and the lunar-linux package management code (which is
> (C) by about a dozen people and licensed under the GPLv2). Neither these
> two groups lose their copyright when you write a module.

If INSTALL file and lunar-linux package are so intelligent and do everything 
why I should make DETAILS, DEPENDS, BUILD etc. files? Why these packages do 
not download files from Internet? Many things must be written in these above 
files to make the lunar and INSTALL script working. Without module 
information these scripts are useless.

Lets compare this situation to artist. You provide paint (lunar tools) someone 
else on the Internet provides canvas (tar.gzipped programm) and artist 
(contributor) use these things to create picture (module).

Using your arguments to this situation: the picture do not belong to artist. 
However the artist made the picture it do not belong to him because we 
provided paint and other people provided canvas. Making paint and canvas is 
more complicated than painting picture so artist does not matter.

This picture was not painted by Van Gogh. This picture was made by united 
colours inc. and super canvas corp.

> Now, this has nothing to do with giving tribute to the contributors who
> wrote all these fine modules. But that is a completely different issue.
> Please keep these two issues separate as they upset the discussion.
>
> Now, I am all for giving more credit to contributors, but like always
> don't see a good way of doing this and keeping it up2date.

A web page with 2 columns: module name, name of maintainer and his/her e-mail 
for people who see old module but do not know how to use lvu.
E-mail address should be little modified to avoid stealing by spamers. The 
maintainer line in module should contain current address of maintainer. The 
author line and previous maintainers should be included as kind of credits in 
other line prevoius_contributors.

> the MAINTAINER 
> field was specifically meant for active developers (not contributors),
> which is why we usually strip out the (contributors) email address. This
> puts some extra burden on developers,

If lunar development team is so huge and do not need help of contributors 
(striping useless things like contact data) I'm sorry I didn't know. It looks 
lunar developers have large amounts of free time which need filling by making 
modules.

>but pays off a bit since people
> will actually mail to the mailinglist instead of to someone who might not
> have time or has disappeared off the face of the earth. This helps and
> has helped in the past.

AFAIK the developers always do not have time. In May I sent 7 modules, all 
working (checked 3 times before sending). 2 of them was included in moonbase 
the rest stuck in queue. Many modules in moonbase is very old, very small 
part of them are being updated often. I believe contributors supervised by 
developers would better take care moonbase. The newbie contributors tutored 
and checked always by developers will become soon power contributors who do 
not need special care and checking. Finally power contributors could be 
converted to developers who tutor next newbies. But without maintainer 
identification we do not know who sent which modues and their quality. So 
there is no possibility to know which contributor have chances to be 
developer and which one need help and teacher.

> My ideas initially and still are to make the lunar-dev mailinglist open
> to non-developers, especially for this group of contributors. However the
> lack of traffic on the lunar mailinglist makes me scared, as people will
> just move their discussions from one list to another, and we again don't
> achieve the goal we want: more people discussing lunar.

Its normal that people try to find good place to live in Internet. Source 
based distros is good idea. Lunar looks very interesting. Making modules is 
fun and good hobby for people who do not like to cook hamburgers in garden. 
Anonymizing modules or code kills this satisfaction. Thus people leave lunar 
trying to find other places where they will have little part of them in big 
project but not anonymous brick in someones else wall.

> I'm in the middle of releasing an ISO here, and will get back tho this
> later.

I think it is high time to close this subject. You told me how it looks and 
now understand. I realized that do not fit to lunar and will manage to find 
other distro which will be closer to my point of view. I do not want to 
bother people and mess mailing list with my ideas which do not fit in here.

greets,
zbiggy
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