[Consortium] LA.org "official fork" software

[Spencer Jackson]

It was asked that this discussion was moved to this list since it is meta
to the LAD list itself. I will attempt to comply though this list has been
inactive for nearly 3 years.

The recent unfortunate situation highlighted by Jonathon Liles' lengthy
rant in [LAD] regarding his Non-Session-Manager software and the fork
called New-Session-Manager does raise some questions.

Johnathon has a history of being difficult to work with, caustic in his
writing, and I can understand the motives to fork, especially considering
the lengthy time since any previous NSM release. I don't think the fork is
the issue nor particularly germane to the discussion. I imagine the
situation would have been avoided with some more cooperative effort from
Johnathon, but I also won't criticize him too harshly for having a vision
for his project and rejecting requests that didn't fit in that vision.

While I do not subscribe to Johnathon's assignment of malice and subterfuge
it does seem that the list moderators releasing a fork under the
linuxaudio.org brand is probably overreaching the consortium's mission: "to
promote and enable the use of Linux kernel based systems for professional
audio use."

I believe that releasing the software under the names of the authors'
rather than under the would have helped make this situation look less like
an attempt of the organization to replace a developers project without
acknowledgement of his contributions. I'd like to politely request the
authors of the New Session Manager refrain in the future from releasing
software as official linuxaudio.org versions. It seems appropriate to me
that this be written into the policies of the consortium to avoid future
instances where developers may feel their software is being replaced by the
organization itself.

I am assuming the consortium would like to remain project agnostic rather
than picking the winners and losers of which projects get the LA.org
blessing.

_spencer
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