Re: ncurses 4.1

Richard Stallman wrote:

> I'd rather not come to any conclusion about who did right or wrong,
> or
> what the FSF ought to do, without knowing the facts and hearing both
>
> sides of the story.
>
> Eric, could you tell me the specific things that Dickey did which
> you
> think are wrong? If you prefer, you could tell just me, rather than
>
> the whole list. That could avoid distracting harsh arguments.

 I'm now active as an ncurses contributor (forms, menu and GNAT
binding)and maintainer (various essential changes to broken or
incomplete stuff) since 1995.

I don't understand what's going on. Thomas Dickey is a competent and
fair maintainer of ncurses. He puts in all the names of people
contributing patches or new ideas to ncurses, even people reporting a
problem are mentioned. In all my EMail conversations with him he
reacted properly, competent and humble.

He is the one doing continuos maintenance on ncurses, publishing patches

on a weekly basis. His takeover of the ncurses project wasn't a
hijacking!
This has been discussed between Zeyd, Eric, Thomas and me.

What Eric says is simply unfair. The only occasions his name on ncurses
items became visible in the last months was when he started a flame war
like the current one. If he feels this is an unfair statement I ask him
to give
an example of a significant contribution to ncurses he made in the last
12
month. My impression is that he knows a lot of people and has a lot of
contacts in the freeware scene, and now he abuses this for his private
war against Thomas Dickey. If Eric really has no interest in maintaining

ncurses, why doesn't he Thomas just let do his good job.

As a contributor to ncurses I'm really shocked about his attempt to
reclaim the copyright. I started to contribute two years ago based on my

understanding, that this is free software as stated in all headers. They

actually asked for contributors. Shall I now also withdraw all my code
because I'm pissed of by this childish behaviour? What a nonsense!!!
But as a reminder to Eric: acording to your own arguments not all of
ncurses belongs to you!

I really ask you all to calm down and come to a consensus how the
ncurses project should proceed. To convince me you should present a
good argument why any new arrangement should be better than the
current working one.

Juergen

--
http://home.t-online.de/home/Juergen.Pfeifer