patiently waiting for GNU to fork GNU ncurses so that it is LGPL version

@ariadne LMAOing so hard

@ariadne Is the FSF allowed to do that? According to the ncurses FAQ, they aren’t:

For what it’s worth, the agreement which we (original ncurses developers) made with the Free Software Foundation reads in part:

The Foundation promises that all distribution of the Package, or of any work “based on the Package”, that takes place under the control of the Foundation or its agents or assignees, shall be on terms that explicitly and perpetually permit anyone possessing a copy of the work to which the terms apply, and possessing accurate notice of these terms, to redistribute copies of the work to anyone on the same terms. These terms shall not restrict which members of the public copies may be distributed to. These terms shall not require a member of the public to pay any royalty to the Foundation or to anyone else for any permitted use of the work they apply to, or to communicate with the Foundation or its agents in any way either when redistribution is performed or on any other occasion.

As is well known, that precludes relicensing to the GPL in any version, since it would place restrictions on which programs may link to the libraries. That would deprive a substantial fraction of the current user base of the use of subsequent versions of the software. No such restriction exists in the ncurses license.

… but I don’t see how that agreement precludes relicensing to the (L)GPL, as it says nothing about placing restrictions on which programs may link to ncurses.

(Also, ncurses has been part of GNU for a long time, why would they relicense now?)

@noisytoot i am mostly expressing frustration with a GNU person who wants to see original pkg-config (which has been basically bitrotting for 8 years) continue because "he sees value in a copyleft pkg-config"

@noisytoot while i do not believe GNU is a cancer on software freedom quite yet, stuff like this certainly makes me start to ponder the idea

@ariadne

oh. I was wondering what this was about.

@noisytoot