Hi fellow TUs, devs and archers! I'm writing this long e-mail to discuss the current situation about sancho-gtk, a [community] package I'm maintaining. I inherited sancho-gtk, a front-end for mldonkey, when mOLOk resigned from his TU position, and some time ago I checked if everything was ok with it. In the PKGBUILD I found an ugly hack to download the software, which is hosted on Sourceforge but isn't available at the traditional download location. It is rather distributed through a direct link in its homepage (http://sancho-gui.sourceforge.net/), but that link changes every few minutes: because of this came the ugly hack. The whole thing, I discovered, was done on purpose by its author, whom I contacted for explainations. He pointed out that the download page page states "no redist/pkging/mirrors pls". I don't like forwarding private e-mails, so here's a summary of what I found out and some of my assumptions. * The author doesn't like his software to be repackaged because he doesn't want users complaining upstream for distribution-level bugs. * He doesn't really care if his user base drops to near-zero because his software isn't easily available and integrated in linux distributions. * I wasn't able to find the application's source code (the GTK version, at least) on his site, so I assume it is a closed source app. When the author was asked to clarify his position, include a license and, in case of a free one, the corresponding source code, he didn't answer. * The author thinks software inclusion in a linux distro is "opt-in" (his words), and states he never asked for it. When I pointed out that free software has nothing to do with opt-in, he stopped answering my e-mails. * The author never clearly stated (even though I asked) if we are infringing any license by redistributing the software. * An important phrase I think i just have to report is "I don't think a license has ever written any software", referring to his preference of distributing his software only through the homepage. I want to drop this software from our repos. Not because he asked for it, but because it looks like this person doesn't really understand what free software and a community are, and that we are persons, too, with our rights. He's not the kind of person I want to deal with. I also think he is in violation of Sourceforge terms, since he's maintaining what looks like proprietary software on their servers. What do you think about the whole thing? I already decided to drop both sancho-gtk and mldonkey (its development seems to be stalled), but there are more questions. Should I notify him to Sourceforge in case he is infringing? Should I drop the package to [unsupported]? Should I delete it? Should I hand it to another maintainer? I wouldn't want to see another ion3, but I don't think it's very different. Should we try to define special policies for cases like these? Corrado