License issues

Moin,

it seems that the Elm license is not compatible with the GNU General
Public License and hence it is difficult to marry Elm code with GPL
code. Even though I'd like to contribute GPL code myself this is not
the main problem but that I plan to add some Mutt code which is placed
under the GNU GPL. Hence, I came to the conclusion that I'd be on a
rather lost track trying to improve newmail from within Elm instead of
starting from scratch.

Getting the Elm license modified would require the Elm people to
contact all contributors of code who have contributed to the files and
function I have extracted from the original Elm package. This will
take rather long and it is not sure if it will be successful at the
end.

Hence, I came to the conclusion that it will most probably be easier
to start from scratch. This will also have the benefit of a much
cleaner design and less old cruft which the Elm code still carried
with it. Since Elm is from 1986 it is quite logical to be prepared to
run on very old Unix boxes. There was still code for USB names, for
example.

For reference and to have the links archived properly there were two
discussions about the Elm copyright on the debian-legal mailing list
from the Debian project. Free Software bigots usually tear non-free
licenses apart so that the good and the bad get separated. There were
several problems discovered with the Elm license unfortunately.

The first discussion was in September 1997 after a networking
conference in Aachen:

    http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1997/10/thrd2.html#00531

The second discussion was in November 2004:

    http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/11/msg00100.html

Interestingly, both time the discussion was started by me.

As a result from this, I'll scrub the current CVS repository in a few
seconds and will start with new files again which I've hacked together
yesterday and this morning already. I'll place the CVS tarball into
the download directory on <http://www.infodrom.org/projects/newmail/>.

I've also configured commits to be sent to the infodrom-newmail-cvs
list for anybody who wants to watch the development or contribute.

Regards,

        Joey

-- 
MIME - broken solution for a broken design.  -- Ralf Baechle