Wedge

OK, I'm going to say what I've been thinking privately but this is pretty much forcing my hand. I believe Kindred, through his statements here, is actually more of the problem than of the solution.Wait, you mean the team were saying things that the dev team couldn't do? Say it ain't so! ::)*sings* The CIIIIIRCCCLEEEE, the CIRCLE of LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFEEEEEEEEEEE

This is what I really meant about the devs being told what they could and could not do. If you stonewall someone by pretending they don't exist or ignoring what they're saying just because it's them saying it, you have a huge problem. This happened to Runic before I joined, this happened to me while I was on the team - it's happened to others, and it will go on happening.I'm glad you feel you can do so :)Also wonderful. SMF is a strong base to work upon. Rewriting it is a formidable task but in so doing you get to shape it how you see fit, which is a wonderful thing. You don't have to pander to a given demand other than what you set for yourself.

It won't be core. It will be a plugin. It may or may not be free. If it is not free, it will not be any more than $20 or so as a one off payment.

I can't port the plugin; I'm not allowed to do so by its licence but in any case the amount of changes mean it's closer to a rewrite than a port.

Thanks, I'll fix it, I didn't test it properly before, will commit that in a bit along with a few other bits and pieces.

So a non dev misrepresented it to the board. Fantastic. Why is anyone listening to a non dev about dev matters, unless they are a legal person?Object to it all you like. Fact remains, that's the story being given, and just because you're not seeing it in 18ft high neon red letters doesn't mean it isn't happening. Not all of this is public, not all of it is in posts.Can't speak for IchBin. As for Spuds, he's not entirely thin-skinned from what I've seen, so if it was a poor joking suggestion, it must have been really poor.

Suki left because there seems to have been some kind of shutting out going on. When you get to the stage where people stop listening to what you have to say because it's you saying it, you're being shut out - and that is one form of not having your say in how things are run, especially with what you make.

emanuele has not left yet, but I think his words speak for themselves.And even when I give you a prime example of that you're still not seeing it? Are you as wilfully dense as you have accused others of being? (me, ARG, ref the Charter membership != donation stuff)

Yes, I'm frustrated. There is a serious lack of communication going on here.

If I give my code over to you complete with copyright assignment, I don't have final say in it, simple as that. I have no guarantee that SMF won't pull an Amacythe afterwards.

As I said... not having total control doesn't just come down to the stuff you think you've seen.So the fact I have an instance where team leader votes were rigged so that one person could be pushed forward towards being a developer is not part of that. Admittedly it was just before J10 landed, which should give you a clue as to what went down and why.Fair enough. I don't think it matters - or really helps - at this stage to point fingers, god knows we've done enough of that. But as far as I'm concerned that wall is very much still present - even if you don't think it is.

I have had multiple debates with people on the team recently who seem to believe the devs are no more important to the project than support staff, even though they're far less replaceable. When that mindset is entrenched, you're stuffed, because if a dev feels their contribution isn't being valued, that's another form of feeling like they don't have control over what they're doing.That's not really my point. Could you recruit a developer into the team, with things like this thread going on, laying all the evils to bear in public? That's why I'm deliberately doing this - not to drive developers away but to ensure beyond doubt that anyone who does sign up understands what they are getting into. And that's important, because nobody wants to contribute effort into beating a dying horse.That's because it wasn't ever posted anywhere. Don't make me name and shame with chat logs confessing it. I'd rather leave it at that for the other party's sake.

But there's other cases of people doing things with their own agenda.Yes, we do. I've stated why I believe you don't need to worry about it and shouldn't worry about it. Argue the opposite side: tell me why you believe it is necessary.


I still reckon it's moot until you can find someone to take up the reins. Because if not, you can safely shelve SMF development entirely after 2.1, either permanently, or temporarily until you can get yourselves sorted out. But then you still have to find someone willing to actually step up and do the work, and given the attitude being shown, the list of candidates is pretty damn small.

I have since seen more discussion of the above from the NPO where it is discussed.

Let me bring another thing to the table. The Linux Kernel, GIMP, GNOME and others. NONE of these require copyright assignment, which is what this little fracas is really about.

Do they need copyright assignment? Nope. Linux itself, for example, has trademarks - Linus Torvalds himself holds the trademark to Linux[1] and that is enforced by the Linux Foundation or whatever it's called. SMF's trademarks would be equally enforceable through the NPO. This is not under dispute.

What benefit does copyright assignment give to SMF? It gives them the legal right and ability to change the licence in future should they need to.

Here's where it gets messy. We've all seen the fuck-ups that occurred in the past and we want to avoid those. Having an NPO doesn't magically fix that, there are bad NPOs just as there are good LLCs.

When copyright is reassigned to SMF, we implicitly lose control over what SMF does with that code, and there's the rub. If SMF decided tomorrow that it wanted to move to a proprietary licence, all the code that was granted under a CLA means SMF can do that without even asking because we assigned them copyright to do so.

A DCO on the other hand doesn't assign SMF that right. It merely asserts that SMF is free to use the code as it sees fit - provided the licence is adhered to.

This is the rub that us developers have an issue with: there is absolutely no need for SMF itself to take copyright over our work. As I said, it doesn't appear to have stopped Linux in its tracks anywhere I can see. A DCO doesn't allow them to do so, but it means our work can be used in conjunction with the terms of the BSD licence.

See, we all saw what happened with Amacythe. What's to stop the NPO going the same way? And please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that it can't happen, because it absolutely can. It just hasn't thus far. And we don't want to give up our rights in case it does again.

Note that I'm well aware that even a CLA allows us to reuse our own work, but that's not the point. Us having a CLA doesn't stop SMF going closed source if it wanted. Us having signed a DCO DOES.

Now, the next argument is that without copyright assignment, how can the licence be enforced? It has been, successfully, several times amongst several projects that all do this. Including the Linux kernel.


So, I would like someone to explain to me what benefit it would bring SMF to absorb our copyrights under one umbrella one. Until that happens, this is just going to go around in circles.

1.	Though, not until after a legal battle.

I deliberately did not ascribe any individual or individuals to whoever represented the DCO to the team, as it would have been between multiple people.

I'd love to see the quotes - unedited and in context - to back this up, because I'm finding it very hard to believe that you were misrepresented as to what a DCO means.

In which case, let's just not cache them into the CSS and just leave them as regular HTTP requests - they're not that common (you have to know that they're there to use them)

I don't think users need to be given that detail to be honest; there is such a thing as too much choice.

I'm still not making myself clear, I can see this.

Smileys are ALREADY loaded into the main CSS file, automatically. It's been that way for months. Seriously, check the code for any smiley on the site thus far. ;)


But it relies on having physical files coming into the system to read, encode and store in the CSS. I'm proposing changing *this* part of the process and only this part of the process, to be able to streamline smileys being added, ideally without having to have write access anywhere that is currently needing write access.

Though it just occurred to me that it might cause IE to poop itself as it doesn't like overly long data URLs.