29 Jan
2011
29 Jan
'11
8:11 p.m.
On 1/29/11, Raymond Martin wrote:
I can feel a holy war in the air :)
There are perfectly justified cases when a fork a necessary. Off top of my head:
- principal developer in the way of getting things done (Sodipodi > Inkscape)
- principal developer starting everything from scratch, because he
thinks he knows better (Protux > Traverso)
- principal developer not available and not replying any mails (GQView > Geeqie)
- developer/company at the helm of a project disrupting development
and threatening future of this project (OpenOffice > LibreOffice)
Your reasoning however is on the level of "Why does a dog lick his
balls? Because he can.".
In other words, the multitude of things that are legal doesn't 100%
overlap with multitude of things that are nice. All people learn it,
easy way or hard way. (Of course, some people never learn.)
What you are
saying boils down to "people had been dicks on me, so
I'll be a dick on everybody else in return". Talk about childish :)
Absolutely wrong. It is just a fact that you do not owe anything and are not
required to do anything besides adhere to the license. It is just a waste of
time to bother going through trying to be nice when so many people (like you
perhaps) react the wrong way. Just do what you want with the software and
forget all that childish crap. FOSS is everywhere by people acting like me.
This is the most awesome bullshit I heard this week :) I owe you few
minutes of good honest laughter. In all possible meanings, good and
bad, FOSS is where it is, because there are few people who give
against millions of people who take. When those few people who give
start fragmenting their efforts because they lack social skills and
patience (just like you they often have all sorts of amusing
justifications for that), they often get nowhere.
There are lots of projects that demand quite a lot of technical
competence and can only exist and mature, if people collaborate. I've
seen this recently with the whole dlRaw/jlRaw/Photivo forks story.
Even smaller, less significant projects suffer from lack of
collaboration. Most recently I was looking for a wiki app for Django
and came across half a dozen of forks, all originating from the first
app, all incomplete. Because people thought they knew better.
Not every company or developer that uses FOSS goes out
of there
way to thank the originators. They don't have to. Yet at some point
they contribute their work that may be built on previous work.
That is the thanks.
The "I don't owe anyone anything" attitude, right :)
Well, indeed doing some awesome work on top of someone else's work is
a very reasonable kind of gratitude, when you are civilized about
that.
So get a clue now and try to think beyond your ego.
I have one question: do you ever follow your own advices? :)
Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org