The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: ALERT! Abort RPM nonsense now!

On Wed, Sep 24, 1997 at 03:14:00PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote:
> Debian project policy is to not treat other distributions as the enemy.
> 
> Red Hat has not been bad to us, even if they have never explicitly stated
> their social contract with the free software community. They GPL-ed their
> code, which is more than others have done. If they choose to protect the
> "RPM" trademark, we'd call it something else. If the GPL is not sufficient
> protection, we are in much bigger trouble than just having problems with
> our package tool.
> 
> We have to look at what outsiders are doing and learn from it. We should
> not have "not invented here" syndrome.

Agreed agreed agreed! But analyze my statements more carefully. You
will notice that I have not cited POSIX as something to be avoided and
it is a "competing distribution mechanism". RedHat is not an "enemy"
but it is an incompatible legal construct in lieu of a concise
definition of terms on their part.

It is as fundamentally dangerous to play with the trademarks and brand
names of incorporated legal entities as it is to cut and paste
copyrigted code into a GPL'd project. I know that we could "just
switch" but I would encourage you to envision what this would mean to
the "newbie" users that are in the fold. The ramifications could be
significant and extremely irritating.

If RedHat is a well behaved entity they will work with other
organizations to finalize the POSIX packages implementation and
implement it to the letter. This is the standards process. Where is
the .rpm review board? who sits on it? how is a final decision reached
as to whether a change should be made to the .rpm format? can I join?
This is not open and not a standard and in abscence of any other
statement it is the trademarked intellectual property of a corporate
entity that is growing fast enough to attract investor capital and
perhaps groom itself to go public. Warning! Beware!

The last thing we need is package maintainers waking up to find a
cease and desist in their mailbox one morning.

Ok, I'm paranoid! So what! It's very healthy in today's computer
industry. Just ask the .zip extension!

E
-- 
_______________________________________________________________________
Ean Schuessler                Director of New Products and Technologies
Novare International Inc.        The Unstoppable Fist of Digital Action
--- Some or all of the above signature may be a joke

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