[LAU] [LAD] Aeolus

Monty Montgomery xiphmont at gmail.com
Thu Sep 19 16:34:13 UTC 2013


....

I'm a bit mystified.

Fons, you explicitly granted other developers the right to do...
exactly what they did.  And now you're miffed about it?

I'm.... missing something.

There is not and never was any expectation in free / open source that
you, as a developer, are owed anything whatsoever by those who use
your code (outside of stipulations of the license).  And you,
similarly, don't owe them anything either.

Perfect symmetry.  That's where it starts from.  Letting go of the
need to control everything, to enforce being the smartest guy in the
room.  Sometimes a nice little community of mutual cooperation springs
up... It happens often, but that's still the exception, not the most
common case.

Now, if others play dirty, strip off your copyright attribution for
example, claim they wrote it not you, that's different.  I'll join you
on the warpath.  Did that happen in this case?

(95% or more of the folks who use my code fork it and I never hear
about it.  That has always been true.  I didn't even know Spotify was
using Vorbis until somone spotted the symbols.  The freaking iPhone
ships a fork of Speex, again, found by dumping a Siri stream.  AoTuV.
A hundred other examples that I'm perfectly fine with...)

If you want a community, you have to build it.  No one owes it to you,
no one will do it for you.  Writing the code is the easiest part of
building an ecosystem.  Ecosystem dynamics are hard.  Closing the
source will probably make it harder.

Monty


More information about the Linux-audio-user mailing list