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Re: Bidi-less Applications Patching Policy



On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 12:43:32PM -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> 
> NO NO NO NO.  People here always confuse LGPL with GPL.  The way
> to go is to convince people to use an external library
> (compile-time optional, or even run-time optional).  So, you go

The problem, Behdad, is that we have the following situation:

  + eager developer willing to spit code by the second
  + bottleneck of politics and persuasion

I can tell you that I _personally_ would rather never see anything but
FriBiDi in existence. I don't know how many other share my view, but
that's how I see it. The more bidi libraries out there the more of a
problem it could become.  

However, we cannot afford to let the "ready to go" coder to sit idle
while we wait for x project to consider fribidi.

Then, you have cases like PuTTY where it was more than just a license
issue.. it was a matter of policy to not used shared libraries. What do
we do here? We really had no choice.

> and give them an immediate option called miniBidi, so why should
> they ever accept another option?  What you are missing is the

You are right. That is why the whole "policy" thing was born. To say,
look, here is fribidi. They say, noway.. we say, hey, Behdad, these guys
need a little sweet talking, you got 2 weeks to do it.. (surely we will
help).. 2 weeks up, they are not budging.. stalemate. Well, we take
minibidi out. That's the whole idea.

> hassle to update all those embedded minibidi instances in
> zillions of applications later.  Shared libraries have been born
> for a reason...

I agree -- but what about the instances where it's not an option?

> You know my vote of course.  But I'm not in Arabeyes really.  And
> of course Roozbeh just copies mine, if that matters.

Heh.. Arabeyes is not an elite club -- you contribute to it, we consider
you a member (I do) ;) but, you are an aloof one ;)

> 
> I'm up to clear my relation to Arabeyes sometime next week.
> It's more about the policies.  Mine is to contribute to Free
> Software (as defined by http://www.fsf.org/), while Arabeyes' is
> apparently not.

"Apparently"? Arabeyes goals are clearly stated and I don't see how any
of it has changed. We are to contribute to "Open Source" -- the FSF is
too narrow of a definition. But hey, everyone's got their own goals. 

> > Even cooler ;) You know I love MIT/BSD style licenses ;)
> 
> That's the root of our disagreement ;).

That's a personal preference -- has nothing to do with
Arabeyes/*bidi/etc.

Regards
-- 
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| Mohammed Elzubeir    | Visit us at:                 |
|                      |  http://www.arabeyes.org/    |
| Arabeyes Project     | Homepage:                    |
| Unix the 'right' way |  http://elzubeir.fakkir.net/ |
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