Re: [gNewSense-users] gNewSense's 'afio' is non-free?

[Ted Smith]

On Fri, 2008-12-19 at 19:39 +0000, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> Tom Callaway of Fedora says gNewSense's 'afio' is non-free:
> http://spot.livejournal.com/303000.html
> 
> and he implies that there's lots more non-free stuff due to lack of software
> auditing, but he doesn't name other packages.  Maybe if we ask him he'll
> give some pointers that could help us (Brian) to remove more non-free bits?
> 
> Someone commented:
> > So the question is, why do we even need afio anymore? Doesn't GNU cpio do
> > the job? Or pax? Or libarchive or something?
> 
That post seems more like anti-freedom ranting than something that was
in a spirit of actual help. It isn't even clear if that original license
is still valid, as it's quite possible the original code has been
completely replaced by then, created a Ship of Theseus[1]. IANAL and
don't know the legal status of a Ship of Theseus, but isn't this about
the same as the USL v. BSDi case, where the Reagents of the University
of California argued that enough of the original code had been replaced
that it no longer could be considered a derived work?

If Mr. Callaway thinks we don't have enough auditing, he's welcome to
help, I'm sure. Did he notify any of these distributions when he found
afio, or did he just write a snarky blog post about it?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
[2]

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