[gnutls-devel] GNUTLS is not going anywhere

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos]

On 12/13/2012 04:49 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> I pretty much regret transferring all rights to FSF, but it seems there
>> is nothing I can do to change that. If I receive a formal request from
>> FSF I'll change the name of gnutls and continue from there.
> With all due respect to the involved parties: since you discuss this
> on a public list, may I ask to please publish the reasons for this
> schism?  It is sad enough to read about such unfortunate incidents in
> the Free Software movement; doing so without understanding what the
> heck is going on is too much.


It may be fair. The main issue is that I'm tired of pretending that I'm
participating to a project I am only allowed to contribute code (and not
even express a different opinion). All the reasons of quiting however,
accumulated through the years of participation.
If I can summarized them are:
(a) I felt particularly frustrated when FSF (when gnutls started
around 2000) was insisting the transfer of the copyright to it, even
though I had decided to transfer the copyright to FSFE (this is a very
old issue but it had great influence on me as I realized that the
transfer of rights was not simply for protection against copyright
violations).
(b) The feeling of participation in the GNU project is very low, as even
expressing a different opinion in the internal mailing lists is hard if
not impossible.
(c) There is no process for decision making or transparency in GNU.
The only existing process I saw is "Stallman said so"
(this may not be bad, unless some threshold of disagreement has been
reached - but then it is fair to be able to disassociate myself from the
project).

It is true that I did very little to change any of the above and I may
have let quite some people down, but after few discussions in the
internal mailing lists, I felt there is a pretty big gap between me and
the project (I should distinguish here the GNU hackers from the GNU
project).

regards,
Nikos