From: David Uhden Collado Subject: Re: fvwm(1): replace GPL-licensed code, fix bugs and add improvements To: op@omarpolo.com, tech@openbsd.org Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2026 19:31:00 +0000 > > woah, that's quite the diff! > > To be fair, and I'm saying it as a fairly new fvwm3 user, I'm not sure > how much interest there is to revamp the old version in xenocara, which > basically means forking it at this point. In order for FVWM to remain in the base system, a fork must be created and maintained because the modern versions are under a license that is incompatible with the project's copyright policy. Another option would be to replace FVWM with a different window manager, such as CTWM. > > it's certainly a lot of work just to get rid of some GPL'd code that has > been there for ages. > Without intellectual "property", *BSD, Linux, and the many UNIX clones would not exist. Today, everyone would be using versions derived from AT&T's original UNIX source code, saving countless hours of work and resources. > anyway, I feel like the diff is a bit too big to be handled in just one > go, especially since you're both improving and moving stuff around. > > if you really have interest in working on this, I'd suggest to try to > split it in manegeable pieces, so that it can be reviewed and improve > the chances of it getting into the tree. > > especially for the licensing part, which needs quite a throughful > inspection. The truth is that I find it difficult because I've made so many changes that I have a hard time remembering which code corresponds to which change. However, I can divide it into two parts: rewriting the code under the GPL and eliminating some documented bugs and compiler warnings. I also noticed that the indentation of the source code files was chaotic and the manual pages were not well formatted, so in my latest version I used clang-format to indent the code, corrected the manual pages, and removed the commented code that was not used (#if 0). > > (these are just my two cents) > > > Thanks, > Omar Polo