[Spread-users] Anon cvs, yes, no, etc.

[Joshua Goodall]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Yair Amir wrote:

> We actually don't care to track those that use cvs with accounts. We
> care that others will have to go through the download page to have the
> chance to get their info and comments. (They can always input
> nonsense, but most agree). Anon-cvs defies that.

I am going to jump the gun and point out that the BSD-style license allows
any existing copy of the 3.16.0 source tarball to be redistributed without
requiring tracking, notification etc. That genie is already out of the
bottle.

What's more, any of the existing holders of named CVS access can roll up
and distribute snapshots, and even make a rough mirror of the repository
through checkouts of the entire revision tree.

However, I personally am not doing so (although I have the facilities for
it) because I recognise that the authors wish to gauge interest in this
first OSS release with a couple of "paper barriers".

I am considering submitting an entry for Spread in the FreeBSD
ports/packages tree, at which point I *will* need an anonymous source
download. I would choose to confer with the authors before doing so,
because I respect their intellectual property no matter how it is
licensed. No doubt those who create .rpm's, .deb's etc will feel the same.

Yet Spread OSS is recent and I don't feel there's a hurry yet.

Joshua