Comment 9 for bug 1779764

Revision history for this message
ole.tange (n-launchpad-net-tange-dk) wrote :

T> The issue is that the software is licensed as GPLv3, and the GPLv3
T> does not permit this notice: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-
T> faq.en.html#RequireCitation

RMS disagrees with you. See the FAQ:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/tree/doc/citation-notice-faq.txt#n27

T> The Debian maintainers reviewed the citation notice as implemented
T> in parallel and viewed it to be in violation of GPLv3, and patched
T> it out, renaming from “GNU parallel” to “parallel”. Arch Linux and
T> OpenSUSE have also patched out the citation notice. Summary of
T> other distros stance here:
T> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/110584#issuecomment-766158970.

And they thereby make it harder for me to justify spending time on
development. If they feel the citation notice violates GPLv3 (and they
thus disagree with RMS), then the fair thing would be to assume the
author's intentions are correct, and that the software is
mis-licensed. If this would cause it to be moved to non-free, then
that would be fine by me.

Instead they did what suited *them* better, and thereby made it harder
to finance development long term. If you want more free software to be
developed, then going against the developers' wishes sends a pretty
bad signal to would-be developers.

I cannot say it better than Nadia Eghbal in
https://www.slideshare.net/NadiaEghbal/consider-the-maintainer:

"Is it alright to compromise, or even deliberately ignore, the
happiness of maintainers so we that can enjoy free and open source
software?"

>> I have yet to come across a journal, that restricts citations to 50:

T> Nature restricts to 30, or up to 50
T> (https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/initial-submission).

I think you misinterpret those. They are guidelines. Not
restrictions. This proof with 67 references (one of them being GNU
Parallel) was also included in my previous email:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65360-y

A more convincing argument would be a rejection letter from a
journal.

But even if there was a restriction, you could simply use an
alternative or build your own. No one forces you to use GNU Parallel.

I hope we agree that our long term goal is to have more free
software developed.