[H]omer <spam@xxxxxxx> espoused:
> Verily I say unto thee, that spike1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx spake thusly:
>> [H]omer <spam@xxxxxxx> did eloquently scribble:
>
>>> I've had very direct dealings with the Amarok team (including
>>> Monroe), and I have to say that my concerns about them have not
>>> entirely been allayed. Monroe issued the equivalent of a takedown
>>> notice against the Fedora maintainer of the Amarok package,
>>> essentially because our version linked against GStreamer, and
>>> Monroe didn't like that fact. I went berserk and read Monroe the
>>> Riot Act (or more specifically the GPL),
>>
>> You should've just said "I can do what I want with it as long as I
>> make the source code available, what business is it of your how I
>> choose to package it?" and left it at that.
>
> It was a delicate issue. I am not the Amarok maintainer, so I was not
> directly in a position to tell Monroe to "get stuffed". Meanwhile, the
> actual maintainer (a bit of a noob) had his head spinning between Fedora
> admin and Monroe, and gave in too easily. Damage done. I was furious,
> and so maybe not thinking rationally (certainly not diplomatically) but
> I was equally aware that some finessing was required to "resolve" the
> issue between both parties, so I eventually tempered my argument. In
> retrospect I regret that. I was angry then, and I'm still angry now.
>
> At the time, I released my own package independent of the main repo,
> half in protest - half out of necessity (to plug the gaping dependency
> hole in the repo). After the "update" which satisfied all parties, I
> pulled my package. I'd do the same if it ever happens again. That was
> *my* solution. It galls me to think that such a thing should be
> necessary. I now fully understand what motivates some people to fork
> distros, beyond some of the more common reasons.
>
The great power of the GPL is that it acts to discourage such , but there
are a large number of examples of developer teams going proprietary,
leaving an old GPLed version and releasing their own proprietary versions
which are the ones which get maintained.
There are very few examples where a proprietary/open split has actually
worked, but I'd probably quote Cedega as the exception here. Otherwise,
either the proprietary or the open fork has come out on top. The OpenGL
penguin racing game (name forgotten) was taken proprietary, but the GPLed
codebase was maintained, and is still in debian, albeit with another name,
and the X split went with the new guys for X.org, and I'm not sure that
X-windows-system even exists any more. Perhaps I should have a look,
for interest.
The mplayer team have made similar pokes at the debian folk for providing
pre-compiled binaries of mplayer, a debate which raged on and off for
ages, with binaries coming and going. I don't really know how that
ended up, but I do know that there are precompiled binaries for several
platforms now, so perhaps the mplayer team have relaxed a bit.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |
|
|
