Smoothwall not free software

[Georg C. F. Greve]

 || On Mon, 27 Aug 2001 14:37:22 +0100
 || Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com> wrote: 

 ah> Richard indicated that the licencing issues had been taken up
 ah> with Georg - is this true, does anyone know?

I guess I would know. :-)

FYI:

Richard Morrell contacted me by mail a while ago and later he called
me on the phone. 

He was telling me about issues he had with his company that apparently
filed for patents on SmoothWall technologies and also asked him to
withhold contributions by others for about half a year so they could
release a proprietary SmoothWall-based product with a head start.

He had some licensing questions and asked me whether I agreed with him
that this behaviour was unacceptable. It isn't hard to understand that
I did. He asked for a mail giving my interpretation of the situation
to show to his company, because there were obviously big discussions
coming up. 

His take on the situation was that if the company didn't modify its
policy to fit with the Free Software philosophy, he would leave along
with the whole development crew of this company.

During our discussion he emphasized multiple times that he wants
SmoothWall to be truly Free Software and wants to have it GPL'ed now
and in the future.

He seemed to be a bit excited, but if you only just learned by
coincidence that your company is doing bad things behind your back (he
told me that the patent office called back the company because of some
beaurocratic mistake and he accidentally answered the phone), I guess
that is to be expected.

He said that he'd try to resolve the situation for the best of Free
Software and I asked him to keep people informed of the proceedings.

Also I told him not to hesitate to involve the FSF Europe if he feels
we can somehow help in securing SmoothWall for the Free Software
community.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
GNU Business Network                        (http://mailman.gnubiz.org)
Brave GNU World	                           (http://brave-gnu-world.org)
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