[LAD] forking (was Re: Aeolus)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2013-09-18 23:54, geoff wrote: hold your horses. Fons said: 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: 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. 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