[LAD] forking (was Re: Aeolus)

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

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On 2013-09-18 23:54, geoff wrote:
> Fons mentions the second fork seems to be changing the license.

hold your horses.

Fons said:
>> Gavioli has even added his 'copyright' to the sources of the
>> libraries that Aeolus depends on but which are not part of its
>> source distribution

now what does this mean?
i would read "adding his copyright" as "adding a line 'Copyright (c)
2013 Joe Mubara'.
this is *not* changing any license. it is claiming to have contributed
code to the given file.

but this is my personal reading of Fons' statement.
since he has been very vague about the actual fork, i did a quick
google, and found https://github.com/mgavioli/oscAeolus/
i didn't bother to checkout the entire project, so instead i just
sampled a few source-files and in "oscaeolus/addsynth.cpp" i found
indeed the lines:

> Copyright(C) 2003-2008 Fons Adriaensen <fons at kokkinizita.net> 
> Copyright(C) 2013 Maurizio M. Gavioli <mmg at vistamaresoft.com>

i compared that to the aeolus source-code as shipped in debian (as i
was too lazy to go to Fons' homepage) and find that the two files are
virtually identical, apart from a rename (.cc -> .cpp), a different
indentation style and the said added copyright.

i'm pretty sure that maurizio's "contributions" do not justify the
added copyright.


> Both situations are ignorant of the spirit of FOSS in my opinion.

in which ways?

i'm not following either MuseScore nor Maurizio's development, but i
*guess* that:
- - Maurizio's fork is an experiment; he took the code and tried out how
far he could push the project to his needs; the project has been
active for *1 month* (during June), and has been dormant since.
the only "problem" is see, is that Maurizio has made his changes
available to the world, by putting it on github.
i fail to see how this is "ignorant of the spirit of FOSS".

- - MuseScore *probably* included Aeolus originally for convenience
reasons (so their users' only need to download a single package).
once you have done *that* , it's darn easy to do your little
amendments to the "swallowed" software (to fit better into their
framework) without really thinking about it anymore.
and then you have the curse of FLOSS: because MuseScore publishes
their code (just like upstream) it becomes obvious that they forked!
again: how ignorant is that?

nevertheless i do share some feelings with fons.

as an upstream developer myself (though not as successful as fons in
whatever i publish), it happens every now and then, that somebody
takes my code and "does things to it".
this has become even more apparent since i started using github, which
provides information about people who forked the project "on-site"
(which doesn't tell me anything about who else forked the project).

i have to admit, that it often hurts a little bit, if a project gets
forked and the forker never ever communicated with upstream about
their desires, and whether it would be possible to integrate them
directly into upstream.

one thing i found crucial here is how to encourage potential
contributors to actually contribute to the code (rather than fork it
silently).

(it became weirder in github times, as i now can see how many people
(not really "many") people create a "public fork" without *ever* doing
anything to it...what is that about?)

mfgadsrt
IOhannes
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