[csw-users] blastwave forked?

[Willie]

Dagobert Michelsen wrote:

<snips aplenty>

>> His seems more of an effort to justify
>> events.
>> To some degree I can see his point, since Dennis certainly
>> doesn't own all that software on the blastwave servers. Or does he? I
>> may be missing something crucial here; is/was the software served from
>> blastwave.org open source or not?

> They are of course open source. But that doesn't necessarily
> mean Blastwave has no rights in it. As this touches international
> law about intellectual property things get even more complicated.
>  From my understanding the package authors always has the copyright
> and therefore the right to relicense his own code to every use
> he likes. However, the build descriptions were derived from GAR
> which was released under GPL, so I guess the build descriptions
> are also under GPL.


I'm speaking of things I have little knowledge of here, but wouldn't it
have been easier all round to start over with the package maintainers
resubmitting their work to the new site? If they wanted to, that is. And
that begs the question of how many package maintainers _would_ want to,
and how they might feel about having their work swiped for a fork if
they were happy just where they were.


> Neither Phil nor Dennis is a saint or devil. 


Maybe so, but there's doesn't seem to be a shortage of malevolence at
every turn.


> I am astonished
> how easy you decide for yourself what is good and what is wrong
> by just reading a few posts. 9/10 of an iceberg are under
> water, you think that is different here?


This I accept. It's a little tedious to prefix everything I say with "If
true, ...", but all I have is what's written by the two protagonists. As
I said, they don't really seem to be in dispute about what actually
happened, which suggests they're telling the truth. If that's the case
then yes, we can legitimately sit here and play jury and judge. The fact
that I've still found nothing of Phil's - even after some effort - that
makes events remotely justifiable is my only reason for leaning to the
side of blastwave. In principle I'd personally be much happier with
development focused on production releases of S8 and S10.


> The atmosphere on the maintainer list was bad for a long time
> now and a few times before the fork has been avoided, sometime
> only very closely - until recently, where the cracks couldn't
> be filled any longer. But again: from the distance all this
> looks easy and simple. It is not.


Accepted again. I'm only an end user with a dim view of the whole mess.


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