19 Sep
2013
19 Sep
'13
6:01 p.m.
On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 17:35:45 +0200, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote
Au contraire - FOSS is all about sharing. When I read Fon's mail
yesterday evening I got the impression of an agressive/inpolite
fork, but after looking at the source code I fail to see this.
The readme/webpage explicitly mentions the upstream project
and Fons' authorship. What else could the author have done?
Inform Fons? Maybe, but maybe he considered the project to young/un-
official. Where _would_ you put a project to share with co-coders, iff
not on github?
Somehow I fail to see the crime commited ...
Adding an OSC interface to Aeolus seems a usefull adition - after all,
isn't Fons planning to add one?
Fons said:
Yes, and why shouldn't it? I read it as a marker to show which
files have been changed.
> 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:
Well, I would take it as a _marker_ - a small side rant:
since non of the original code is trakable with some version
control system (svn/git/bzr/hg...) I think it's a good idea to
add such markers. I've local modifications to Aeolus and that's
exactly how I mark the files I changed. With a working VCS a simple
'git diff' of 'git blame' could tell you what and how the original was
changed (and, with a caring coder, the commit messages would explain
why those changes were made). And of course, for every update of
Aeolus I have to hand-patch my local changes into uptream insteda of
a simple 'git merge' (or the hg/svn equivalent).
Copyright(C) 2003-2008 Fons Adriaensen
<fons(a)kokkinizita.net>
Copyright(C) 2013 Maurizio M. Gavioli <mmg(a)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". 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).
Sometimes the tone on the mailing list (and comments about the
required quality of coding) make such enquiries seem daunting ... ;-)
Anyqay, just my 0.02$
Cheers, RalfD