Wedge

Virtual or real merging?

Did I lose you? ;)

You tell me :P

+1...

The idea, possibly. Probably not the code. Actually, I have yet to look into his own code so I don't even know if I'd see myself using it without a serious rewrite. But that's just me -- I rewrote a healthy chunk of the SMF codebase because it was sub-par with my (and Pete's) standards.That's the point of the BSD license, yes. But that's not the reason SMF went to it. SMF went BSD because it was sort of 'blackmailed' into it by the ex-devs. It just happens to be a positive blackmail.

But now, see how the current SMF team embraces BSD and open source in general.

- The SVN repository... Where is it? Well, it's viewable... By team members and beta testers. And writable by developers only. There are only a handful of people with commit access to the SVN. We're not talking about Git where people can commit and then a handful of overseers will apply their patches to the codebase. No, we're talking about the binary process of updating the codebase or not. Because the repository is private, users simply can't provide SMF with patches. As a result, AFAIK the only public codebase of SMF is Nightwish's repository.
Way to go, BSD SMF.

- The bug tracker... Again, only beta testers and team members can post to Mantis. Everyone can read it, but that's all (and even that was impossible until a couple of years ago.) And there are plenty of reports flagged as 'private' (and not only for security, if you know what I mean...)

- Nightly releases... Only for the same usual suspects. Not that it matters anyway. From what I heard, the SMF SVN hasn't been updated in a month anyway.

So, yeah, SMF doesn't like BSD. They only went BSD because they were required to. That's not the spirit.
Here at Wedge, we don't declare we have the open source spirit in us. We don't openly release things in BSD and then ensure no one gets our patches until we're ready to release.

We do the opposite, actually. We release in closed source, keeping our source code hidden for now. But once we're out, I'll do my best to ensure the SVN is made public for everyone to read and get our latest fixes (and laugh at our new bugs, of course!)
Look at the Changelog topic ('New revs'). It has a complete list of our additions to SMF.
Not only that, but it also faithfully documents every single SMF bug we met and fixed. If anyone in the SMF team will wake up and parse the changelog thoroughly, they'll have dozens of bugs fixed for them instantly. I'm not going to contact the team and offer my fixes for them, because they removed my beta tester access and all of my rights, clearly telling me they don't want my help. Their loss. But I won't let it be said that "SMF has embraced BSD and Wedge hasn't".
Because that couldn't be further from the truth.
We only used an infamous legal loophole in BSD licenses to ensure that SMF won't take advantage of us. Not in these conditions -- with censorship around, with the wrong people in the wrong team position... We'll see what happens from there, when things get better. But right now, it's the only way Wedge can exist. As such, it also doesn't allow other forks to use its own code -- but as you can see, we're open to sharing our trade secrets with them. Just not with the SMF team.

(I don't know how many times I'll have to repeat myself...)Considering how the SMF team doesn't want any outgoing links to wedge.org, do you really think they'd link back to us? In their own *software*?That's the idea.

I must be even weirder, with my constant mix between US and UK expressions. That's what happens when you learn English mostly from TV shows and the Internet. You tend to hear a bit of both ;)

Stop readin' the Oatmeal, FFS :P

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/minor_differences4

Hmm... In French we have 'plus simple' and 'plus simplement'. They really don't mean the same thing. "It's simpler to do this (c'est plus simple de faire ça)", and "He did it in a simpler way (il l'a fait plus simplement)" or "Simply put, you suck at English (plus simplement, t'es nul en anglais)".