From: Refaz Anam [mailto:refazanam@yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2004 06:34 To: Ge van Geldorp Subject: Re: Ekush / ReactOS
Dear Ge van Geldorf,
Thank you very much for asking the clarification. I know, still so many questions are there and need to be answered accordingly. But before proceed I need to introduce myself.
I'm a 40 years old attorney and completed my final education in UK. I'm looking after the Lianasoft Foundation, a non-profit organization and eventually the solicitor from Project 21 side. But I'll try to answer to your questions in normal way and not as a lawyer. :) I involved to the Project 21 just from few months back. Pleaese forgive me if I made wrong answers to the technical questions as I'm not a technical person.
Anyway.............
Your account of the events after the Ekush release somewhat conflicts with my memories of those events. Also, you make it sound like it was impossible to publish the source because of technical reasons. However, in EPC/doc/Readme.rtf (part of the binary package released last week) the following statement was made:
"Q. You guys says "Project published under the GPL" but why don't you published sources? A. Initially we decided that, EKUSH should be published under the GPL. But, still there is some confusion within the team. We are now sharing sources between team members only and unless the confusion goes removed we cannot publish sources"
You are right. Actually, the main problem comes from a few percentage of non-GPL compatible code, some of them are propitery or some are not compatible with GPL policy. But basically those sources came from some other projects and not coded/written by our devs. I personally was afraid to publish these sources publicly without owners written permission. And due to the fact, team was confused to publish the source tree. But Geldorf, I can assure you more than 100% about its cleanliness and there is NO LEAKED SOURCES FROM WINDOWS/WINDOWS 2000.
Sorry Geldorf, I cannot write more for now as I'm going to outside and will be back tomorrow. I'll come with more clarifications when back.
Thanks and regards,
Refaz Anam Lianasoft Foundation
Ge van Geldorp gvg@reactos.com wrote: Dear Mr. Anam,
I've read your announcement that appeared on http://www.ekush.com and on the ReactOS forum at http://www.reactos.com/en/content/view/full/7336. First of all, let me say I'm happy that you've decided to respect the GPL by publishing your source along with the binaries.
The relationship between Ekush and ReactOS has had a very bad start. Personally, I'm willing to forget about this and make a fresh start. This would require honest and open communication from now on. Unfortunately, I have doubts about some of the statements in your announcement, specifically:
"Initial release of Ekush (binary) recently has been published to the Akshor.com and available for download and also started uploading weekly binary snapshot. But it was impossible to make the source downloadable because of the limited bandwidth issue. Site exceeds its maximum bandwidth within 3/4 days after the binary made downloadable; a few GB bandwidth has been increased but reached again to its maximum limit within another 2/3 days and gone down permanently."
Your account of the events after the Ekush release somewhat conflicts with my memories of those events. Also, you make it sound like it was impossible to publish the source because of technical reasons. However, in EPC/doc/Readme.rtf (part of the binary package released last week) the following statement was made:
"Q. You guys says "Project published under the GPL" but why don't you published sources? A. Initially we decided that, EKUSH should be published under the GPL. But, still there is some confusion within the team. We are now sharing sources between team members only and unless the confusion goes removed we cannot publish sources"
This doesn't sound like a techical issue but a deliberate decision by the Ekush team. Again, I'm willing to forget this decision and leave it behind us, but the fact that you seem to distort the truth in your recent announcement worries me.
As some people on the ReactOS mailing list have noted, we need to be sure none of the leaked Microsoft Windows 2000 source makes its way into our code. Since we cannot compare submitted code against the leaked source (that would mean looking at the leaked source ourselves, which would "taint" us) there has to be a level of trust towards the people who submit code. I have to say, so far Ekush has done little to earn that trust.
Just for the record, I'm just one of the developers of ReactOS. I don't (and can't) speak for the other developers, or for the project as a whole.
Best regards, Ge van Geldorp.
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