[packman] New packages for packman (Walter Fey) (Walter Fey)

[Walter Fey]

Hallo,

I think I have to explain the whole situation from my point of few more 
detailed that I planned to do.

Most of the packages I like to submit to Packman were maintained at the 
hamradio project at the openSUSE build service to offer actual packages 
of hamradio related programs to hamradio operators.

During the last years (more than 5) all this work was done only by me. 
All of the spec files did not have any copyright remark, since this is 
not essential for their functionality.

Starting last Winter I noticed that a lot of this packages were copied 
to a different project (hardware/sdr). Actually I did not care about it. 
In April I received an email from one of the maintainers of 
openSUSE/hardware/sdr with the idea to start a cooperation between these 
two projects. We agreed that all SDR (Software defined Radio) packages 
should be maintained  in hardware/sdr and all other, more hamradio 
related packages, should stay in the hamradio project. For the packages 
with overlapping interests, we agreed package for package where it 
should be maintained in future.

So we decided to maintain the packages hamlib, fldigi and flxmrpc in 
hamradio and all other copied packages (a long list) in hardware/sdr. If 
one package, that is now maintained in the other project, is also needed 
for building we would just make a link. My contact person asked me to 
look into the changes that were made in the versions at hardware/sdr and 
take over all improvements. I agreed to this and informed him, that due 
to serious legal concerns, I cannot publish the copyright remark that is 
pointing to SUSE LINUX GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany without a  written 
approval from this company. So we decided to substitute this with a 
different copyright remark which is sufficient to submit this packages 
to factory.

Some changes to the package hamlib were breaking the build or 
functionality of other packages. So I used only some new descriptions I 
found in the spec file at  hardware/sdr and the introduction of 2 sub 
packages. The rest of the file was still the old one that was written by 
me during the last years. I published this version in hamradio and 
expected that the package hamlib and the others would be removed from 
hardware/sdr.

That did not happen. After about 2 weeks I received an email from a 
second maintainer of hardware/sdr complaining about  copying parts of 
their spec file without the copyright remark. I informed him about the 
agreement, asked him to talk to the first maintainer and tell me about 
there unique decision how to continue with the cooperation. In the same 
email I offered to stop all and step back to my old version. Since I did 
not get any answer to my mail I made the step back after about one week. 
All packages do not carry any trace anymore from the hardware/sdr 
versions. However the hardware/sdr versions still have a lot of words 
that were written by me in the past.

The next event in this sad story was that I received a very unpolite 
email from Richard Brown blaming me for the things that happened before, 
especially for not using the copyright remark to SUSE LINUX GmbH, 
Nuernberg, Germany. I informed him about the cooperation agreement and 
that meanwhile I removed all changes I copied from hardware/sdr. He did 
not answer any word about the circumstances that led to this situation 
and also did not say anything about the fact that all was removed. In 
his second email he still only continued to blame me for this.

That was the moment when I decided to stop contributing to openSUSE, 
especially hamradio.

It is just not the truth, when Richard Brown is writing that I intend to 
publish packages with removed legal copyright attributions at Packman.

All packages I like to submit to Packman are based on the versions that 
I maintained in openSUSE hamradio before the short try of cooperation 
and do not miss any copyright remark of previous authors who contributed 
to this packages. 2 packages never before left my home project and the 
spec files were written by me from the first scratch.

Regards, Walter Fey - DL8FCL(My ham radio callsign)