situation of imapsync and Debian (was: Re: Bug#609845: huge memory leak when syncing large mailboxes)

[Gergely Risko]

Hi guys,

Executive summary for new recipients (debian-legal): imapsync has
changed its distribution policy, downloads from the author's original
website are not free (as in beer) anymore.  Of course `apt-get source'
or `apt-get install' is still free, as the package is still in the
Debian archive.  The licensing hasn't changed, Debian's distribution of
the package is still legal.  As the maintainer of the package, I am
starting discussion about the future of this package in the archive.

Details:

Sorry for hijacking this thread for license/distribution discussions,
but I guess this is the best way to keep the people notified who are
already in this discussion.

On Fri, 14 Jan 2011 06:09:22 +0100, Gilles LAMIRAL <gilles.lamiral at laposte.net> writes:
> So I have no shame about imapsync and won't ever have any.

No shame on either sides.  I totally agree: you should have a safe and
nice living and you should have enough money to pay for it.

On an orthogonal note, I am not feeling comfortable about dealing with
imapsync Debian packaging anymore.  It is my (sparse) free time and I
would like to commit it to projects that are free (as in speech _AND_
beer) and easily downloadable from the original author without any kind
of payment and/or license reading/investigation.  Please accept my
decision about this.  Thanks for all the time in the past you have spent
on discussing with me, dealing with Debian stuff.

I do not have the legal skills to discuss wether your webpage and your
distribution policy of imapsync
(http://www.linux-france.org/prj/imapsync/) is compatible or not with
the debian social contract.  I will leave this to the debian-legal
people.

Now imapsync doesn't have a debian maintainer anymore, so we will have
to look for a new one.  You can read about the Debian process for this
at http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/.  Of course the upstream author's
opinion is very important to us, so Gilles, let me ask you a few
questions:

   - do you want Debian to continue distributing your program
     (http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/imapsync)?

   - if yes, do you want us to update the package for later versions?

   - if yes, will you provide the source code to us for free and allow
     us to redistribute it?

If it is needed, I am happy to contact the ftp masters to make any
necessary deletion from the Debian archive as quickly as possible.

Thanks again for working with us and I wish you good luck with your
business around imapsync and/or other projects.

Gergely