I knew that as Kitchen Sink got bigger, it would bring more problems. I was prepared for that, but I didn't know how out of compliance I am with the included licenses. I am not a lawyer and licenses are not written for regular people.
Mozilla
I can't seem to figure out how to contact the organization about its licensing scheme. The web site info page is unclear at best and they don't have any contact information for additional questions on that topic. Its as if to say "lawyers only". Not very community oriented. I'm worried that if I can't get this cleared up that nobody will want the Kitchen Sink without Firefox.
The owner of PortableApps.com got special permission to redistribute Firefox but hasn't gotten back to me on who he talked to. Admittedly, its not his problem.
GPL
In the process of all this, I realized its possible that I may have deleted a GPL notice somewhere along the line, which is not surprisingly expressly against the GPL. So now I've got to go back and dig through all my programs that are GPL'd and verify that they have some kind of notice. I have a cleanup process with all the included software to remove useless information that sometimes catches good files.
One option is to reinstall EVERY program and at least attempt to read the included license and anything I don't understand or can't decipher will probably have to be thrown out. This could take weeks.
Other Programs
This is looking like an unending process: someone is always about to email me about one of the over 200 different programs asking me to take out or add some component. My collection is 400 megs -- who wants to download the latest version that's fully compliant when only like 4 kilobytes of data on one of the licenses are different? I don't have a CVS server to post nightly uploads and my users consistently ask for me NOT to distribute things via the web, but through Torrents.
Summary
A lot of unexpected problems but I'll try to get them cleared up. Lupo contacted me and invited me to work on his project (which is growing in appeal) but I still think Kitchen Sink has something unique and important to provide to the community.
I've taken down my donation page, since I'm not really distributing anything anymore.
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2 comments:
I've been using kitchen sink for a while now and it sucks to hear its going down. I wish i had free time to help but college is killing me right now.
Its a great collection and hope everything gets worked out
Thanks ZP -- I hope so too. Sadly, the next version will be dramatically slimmer than the one you're using now, so I hope its still useful.
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