A bit premature, but I suppose I should ask...

A note: This is *entirely hypothetical*.

There is a possibility that I will end up, in the short-term
future (perhaps a month, maybe-more-maybe-less) with a few extra
hours a week, and no longer in a programming job.

If this happens, I'll be looking for a way to get some programming
credibility, and I'll have some free time, and I'll be looking for
a project.

While a lot of my personal projects look neat, ncurses looks to
be in need of a maintainer that not everyone hates yet. I would
like to know if any of the principals in this dispute would have
any strong objections to me becoming a maintainer, and/or the
"official" primary maintainer/copyright holder.

I would ideally like to prevent splits, by encouraging people to
contribute fixes and enhancements. I would like to see ncurses
under one of the free licenses. My current preferences are BSD
and Artistic, but I could be persuaded to consider LGPL.

My main interest would be in preventing a lot of redundant work going into
two, three, or more versions of curses. I just submitted a bug fix
for 4.4BSD curses last week, and I'd rather it be the last. A freely
distributable, stable, version of ncurses would be a Very Good Thing,
and the thing it seems ncurses needs most right now is a bit of
"enlightened politics", and a party that no one will feel constrained
to sue.

I will not attempt to force this on anyone; however, if you are likely
to object to me as a maintainer, *PLEASE SAY SO NOW*. Don't let me
get two weeks into the project (if the primary folks decide they think
I'm good for this), then suddenly throw up your hands in disgust at
this greenhorn pedant and go fork your own distribution, or start a
new one.

Save that for next year. :)

-s
p.s.: Qualifications available on request. Mostly, I know C, and I'm
fairly easy to get along with, and I use curses.
Received on Tue Jun 03 1997 - 22:31:56 EDT