
Nano is no longer a GNU project - wtbob
https://nano-editor.org/news.php
======
mikegerwitz
I'm on the GNU maintainers team; I want to clarify a couple things about this:

First, Nano has _not_ left the GNU project; GNU Nano still does and will
continue to exist. The current maintainer of GNU Nano---Chris Allegretta---was
hoping to add Benno Schulenberg as a co-maintainer, citing numerous
contributions by him. Unfortunately, Benno refused to accept GNU's
maintainership agreement, and so was not appointed. Benno also did not want to
assign copyright to the FSF for his contributions.

Instead, it seems, Benno decided to fork the project. But he did so with
hostility: he updated the official GNU Nano website, rather than creating a
website for the fork.

It's early, so there's still discussion going on, but again, to be clear: GNU
Nano has absolutely not left GNU.

~~~
zx2c4
I don't know anything about the politics involved, and I don't even use nano
(vim guy myself), but I just ran this out of curiosity:

    
    
        zx2c4@thinkpad ~/nano $ git shortlog -sne --since '3 years ago'
          1298  Benno Schulenberg <bensberg@justemail.net>
            64  Chris Allegretta <chrisa@asty.org>
             6  Jordi Mallach <jordi@gnu.org>
             3  Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>
             3  Mike Scalora <mike@scalora.org>
             2  Rishabh Dave <rishabhddave@gmail.com>
    

Seems like Benno is clearly the driving force behind the project.

~~~
infodroid
Was it really necessary to also publish their email addresses?

\--

Edit: I know the addresses appear in the Git repo. But they are not accessible
to web crawlers over HTTP. Most code hosting services require a login to see
them as a spam control measure. Which is also why I think they should be
obfuscated at least.

~~~
chris_7
For whom is spam actually a problem? Filters are absurdly good.

~~~
noobermin
Depends on the email service. Colleagues of mine who work at military research
lab have their emails filtered to junk in my email but then I routinely
receive email notices _in my inbox_ from university emails warning me my
"Account is expired/full/overdue" and I must take immediate action by clicking
on a link.

Hint: I think gmail filters are good. The rest? Not so much.

------
dangrossman

        > > As you know, I will not assign my copyright to the FSF, 
        > > nor to anyone else. All the code I write is GPL'ed.
        > > You don't need to own the copyright on any code in
        > > order to be able to enforce the GPL.  [...]
        
        > Indeed, and in fact for a long time the copyright 
        > was owned by me before it was assigned to the FSF.  
        > It's not required per se, but generally speaking, 
        > there must be a Maintainer of the Software who 
        > believes in the ideals of the GNU system
    
        I do believe in the ideal of the GNU system: to have
        computer systems that consist entirely of libre 
        software.
    
        > and will adhere to the GNU coding standards
    
        That is too bureaucratic, not libre enough.
    

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-
devel/2016-05/msg000...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-
devel/2016-05/msg00021.html)

~~~
haddr
That's a great summary and an eye-opener on the whole situation. Everything
aside, but isn't this FSF enforcement a little too much burden for some? Does
it actually change anything? (apart from giving a bad sensation when you hear
"now we own the copyright of your work")

~~~
brudgers
I am not a lawyer.

The strength of the GNU licenses depends on existing copyright laws [plural].
As the copyright holder, GNU is more likely to have standing in an arbitrary
jurisdiction when seeking to enforce the license.

Whether or not enforcement is important is another matter. If it isn't, then
there's nothing but a fantastic warm fuzzy in choosing GNU over a "do whatever
you want" license. To put it another way, license terms like other contract
terms should align with what the author is willing to go through the bother of
enforcing.

------
deevious
Looks like the devels weren't all that happy about assigning the copyright of
their code to the FSF.

Part of the e-mail thread discussing the move is here
[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-
devel/2016-05/msg000...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-
devel/2016-05/msg00015.html)

I did't have the time to dig out the whole conversation history.

~~~
infodroid
I reviewed the discussion but I still can't understand what the controversy is
about. According to the following explanatory note from the GNU project,
developers don't have to assign copyright to the FSF for it to be an official
GNU project:

 _When the developers of a program make it a GNU package, they can decide
either to give the copyright to the FSF so it can enforce the GPL for the
package, or else to keep the copyright as well as the responsibility for
enforcing the GPL._

Source: [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-
assign.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html)

\---

FYI this is the start of the discussion thread:

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-
devel/2016-05/msg000...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-
devel/2016-05/msg00012.html)

~~~
davexunit
>developers don't have to assign copyright to the FSF for it to be an official
GNU project

This is correct, but it's up to the maintainer to decide if their project will
require copyright assignment from all contributors or not. I send patches to a
couple of GNU projects, Guile and Guix. Guile requires copyright assignment,
Guix does not.

Assigning copyright to the FSF is very much unlike assigning copyright to a
for-profit company. The terms that you sign and agree to with the FSF are very
reasonable and they protect the developer from having the license changed
should the FSF be taken over by people that would want to abuse your
contributions.

~~~
snowwrestler
> Assigning copyright to the FSF is very much unlike assigning copyright to a
> for-profit company. The terms that you sign and agree to with the FSF are
> very reasonable and they protect the developer from having the license
> changed should the FSF be taken over by people that would want to abuse your
> contributions.

This does not comport with my understanding of how copyright works. Once you
transfer your copyright to someone, the creative work is entirely theirs. So
what standing would you have to object to what they do with it? It belongs to
them now, not you.

It doesn't matter what an agreement says if you don't have standing in court
to enforce it.

~~~
davexunit
It belongs to them now, but under the conditions that I agreed to. So, they
have to keep the source free or they will have violated a legally binding
agreement with me.

~~~
snowwrestler
What is the penalty for that violation?

~~~
cyphar
The same penalty as with violation of any other type of contract. They would
also lose any rights under that contract because they violated their side of
the deal.

------
tapiwa
Loads of us use nano.

Simple light editor without the overhead (read learning curve), of all the
other big editors.

Sure, I might not write code in it, but when I need to edit a conf file or
two, both on a server, and my desktop, it really hits the spot.

~~~
k__
I use nano, because I didn't "get" Vim.

~~~
blakesterz
I hate to admit it, but that's more or less why I do as well. It's not that I
don't get ViM, it's just that I don't like it. I have TRIED to force myself to
use it. Something about that long reach for the Esc key? I don't know what it
is really, but I just never felt comfortable using it. Emacs is such a huge
monster of a program. 90% of what it does I never touch. Most of the time I
just need to edit a conf file and move on. Being a sysadmin my needs are very
few in a text editor.

~~~
HalcyonicStorm
I add "imap jj <Esc>`^" to my .vimrc That way, I don't leave the home row when
trying to switch modes

~~~
claystu
This is what I do as well. I think it's pretty standard.

------
drinchev
A bit strange, because as far as the history remembers, Nano was explicitly a
fork of Pico, because of the license. [1]

Strange how history rewrites itself.

1 :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico_(text_editor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico_\(text_editor\))

EDIT : Quotes from Wikipedia

`The GNU Project has a clone of Pico called nano which has been developed
because Pico's earlier license was not a free software license, since
distribution of a modified version of the code was ambiguously forbidden.[2]
By default nano attempts to mimic Pico to replicate the environment users are
used to. However it can be configured to offer mouse support, auto
indentation, regular expression searches and even syntax highlighting making
it more useful. Newer versions of Pico as part of Alpine are released under
the Apache License.`

~~~
nailer
Not much history rewriting or strangeness: pico wasn't open source, nano was
open source. nano is still open source.

Nothing has changed with this announcement except who own the copyrights to
the open source code.

~~~
tptacek
Pico was certainly open source; it was part of PINE, one of the older and more
popular Unix mail programs.

~~~
nailer
Pine wasn't open source either. That's why the Linux distros couldn't include
it.

From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_\(email_client\))

"The University of Washington later modified their license somewhat to allow
unmodified distribution of Pine alongside collections of free software, but
the license still does not conform to the Open Source and the Free Software
Guidelines so it is semi-free software, effectively proprietary software."

~~~
tptacek
A-ha. Thanks, that makes sense.

I was just having a hard time getting past the idea that I'd never have had
PINE working if I didn't have the source. :)

------
soyiuz
I use nano all the time when teaching Python, before moving to other more
feature rich editors. It is perfect for quickly explaining the importance of
plain text files. A big thanks to the developers for making software that is
simple, ubiquitous, and lasting!

------
cronjobber
From the mailing list, on using Github:

> Plus, in order to use their services, you need to assume liability

That sounds bad, as in _really_ bad. One important function of Open Source
licenses is to get as far away from liability as possible.

Do people here know whether that's just a misunderstanding, or a realistic
risk of keeping code on Github?

~~~
oceanswave
I think you're conflating the role of a host and the role of a OSS license.

As with most hosts, the issue of liability rests on the owner. I couldn't
upload 50gb of pirated movies to github and cry "github save me, I used you
and now I need you to protect me."

Your software license dictates your liability to users of your code.

GitHub is saying we're just a host, and we defer to the software liscensors on
how their code should be used

------
bechampion
don't want to sound nasty , but is anyone there using nano really ? i know it
come by default in some distros but that's about it really.

~~~
tretiy3
I find it very convenient to open large log files bc Nano is very lightweight.
Something like that:

$ cat /var/log/logfile | grep -n section_start which gives me required line
numbers. and then:

$ nano +lineno /var/log/logfile

and for configs, of course.

~~~
Programmatic
I would go straight to vim and type: "/section_start<cr>", which navigates
straight to that line. Then navigate to the line, "i" to enter insert mode,
make edits, and "<esc>:wq<cr>".

It is absolutely a learning curve, but the power of vim is insane. "dd"
deletes lines, "A" appends to the end, "I" inserts at the beginning,
"<lineno>G" jumps to a line number, all little tweaks that I use nearly every
day in editing files quickly. It's especially nice when editing known_hosts
where it tells you the line of the offending key, just "<line#>Gdd:wq" and
it's done.

------
cdevs
I just hate when I'm in sublime and I hit ctrl+w to search and it closes the
file #fml

~~~
wtbob
For me it's when I'm in Firefox and hit C-s to search and it pops up a save
dialogue …

~~~
smhenderson
I like that Firefox uses '/' for that like vim/less/etc...

Took me a while to get used to it on Windows, was always reaching for C-f, but
once you get used to it it's great!

------
ChicagoDave
Love nano - been using it for something like 18 years or whenever I had my
first Linux server online. I couldn't survive a *nix environment without it.

------
jm0codes
All night will be spent desperately trying to get all the FTP logins back from
this man! _facepalm_

