Subject: Re: [bug#31307] [PATCH] Add MAT, the Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit from Boum

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Sat, 05 May 2018 22:33:45 +0200

Hello Chris,

Chris Marusich <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Should we refrain from adding this package simply because the author is
> not maintaining it any more?  I'm inclined to say "no", but one also has
> to consider whether it is a a good idea to encourage people to use an
> unmaintained tool for protecting their privacy/anonymity.  I'm not sure.

It’s risky, indeed.  As time passes it’s likely to have more and more
known-but-unfixed security issues, which isn’t great.  Leo, thoughts on
this situation?

> In addition, I notice that the license is GPL 2, but it seems the author
> did not specify whether "any later version" can be used.  Therefore, I
> have listed this as gpl2, instead of gpl2+.

Note that unless authors explicitly removed the “or any later version”
phrase from license headers in source files, we write ‘gpl2+’;
specifically, Section 9 of GPLv2 reads:

  If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you
  may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.

Thanks,
Ludo’.