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To fork or not to fork - in other words: Hi :)
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Nao

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Re: To fork or not to fork - in other words: Hi :)
« Reply #30, on August 12th, 2011, 05:15 PM »
Quote from AngelinaBelle on August 12th, 2011, 04:15 AM
Yes, of course, I agree that it is courtesy to communicate. "Hey, I love this bit, and want to use it". Whether the two devs are currently feeling "friendly" or not.  Courtesy. Civility.
That's the idea, yes.
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I assume, of course, that anyone who has put a BSD license on the code has already explicitly expressed their perfect willingness to allow anyone at all to lift a function or class wholesale,
Oh, that's the idea really: they're not willing to do it. They just couldn't do it their way.
And again, that is thanks to the ex-devs who asked for a BSD license change, that we can work on Wedge today. (Not surprising, finally, when you see that many of the ex-devs have precisely joined wedge.org... :^^;:)
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I'm pretty new at SMF.
I'm a veteran, and yet I was never formally invited into the team. Please don't forget that when you consider the relationship between SMF and I. Not that I care about team membership or whatever -- no, what matters here is that we have a team that never showed me a single sign of support. After which, they ended up banning me, then removing all my rights, and finally censoring me. The team you are in, likes to play lightly with people's feelings. You should know that.
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So I may be making some poor assumptions. I assume "everybody" knew the BSD license meant forking was inevitable, and healthy, and that SMF itself will benefit from what the the fork teams learn, and even from reading/using bits of open source code.
Everything Wedge, except our source code and some sensitive discussions, is public. They can re-use our ideas, nothing prevents that. We're not patenting our ideas. But we're not letting SMF re-use our code. They won't let us remove our posts from sm.org, so they know something about 'ownership' don't they?
Posted: August 12th, 2011, 05:13 PM
Quote from Arantor on August 12th, 2011, 05:06 PM
I am given to understand that the plan is to move it onto Git in the future, but other things (outside of development, real life things) are in the way. Not so much that the people with the power are against the idea, merely that they haven't yet made it happen. But honestly, it's not a big job to convert, the entire thing can be basically automated.
Heck, moving it to Git can be done in a few minutes... Open account. Upload files.
The rest doesn't matter. Details can be fixed later.
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Yup. I'd say that there are more private reports that aren't security related than that are.
And they're usually the funnier reads.... :whistle:

Nightwish

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Re: To fork or not to fork - in other words: Hi :)
« Reply #31, on August 12th, 2011, 05:31 PM »
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- 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.
Really? They don't even allow anonymous checkouts?

I can understand the commit limitations as one should be very careful in handing out these privileges, but making anonymous read-only access limited just doesn't make ANY sense to me for an open source project. A strategy never heard of before in the open source world.
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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.
That's just.... hm, better to say nothing...

Nah, really. It seems weird to me. I've been on a number of other open source projects and never really seen one where patches from community members were not welcome or in other words, where people didn't have access to the head branch or trunk code or whatever you name it.

If you're good enough, you can even get a patch into FreeBSD and this project is ruled by people who will reject anything that does not 100% fit their expectations and they have very high expectations and quality standards.

In most OSS projects, you can at least get a patch into review stage unless it fails the very basic checks/coding standards and looks broken at a first glance :)
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- 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...)
Regarding bugs...

Is there anywhere a comprehensive list of bugs in the 2.0 release code base?
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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.
Well, makes sense. If you want to be closed or "semi-open" - fine, do so, nothing wrong with it as long as you don't tell anyone "we're an open source project".

Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to a single instruction that doesn't work.
My SMF-based forum fork

Arantor

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Re: To fork or not to fork - in other words: Hi :)
« Reply #32, on August 12th, 2011, 05:36 PM »
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Really? They don't even allow anonymous checkouts?
You have to be a listed beta tester. And you generally don't get that just by asking.
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they have very high expectations and quality standards.
There's nothing wrong with having high expectations and standards, but if you're a public project and marketing yourselves as such, it seems foolish not to accept patches and contributions. The team was not exactly enthusiastic about accepting patches even from team members going back...
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Is there anywhere a comprehensive list of bugs in the 2.0 release code base?
Not really, no. There is a list of bugs outstanding in 2.0 in their Mantis install. Just look under SMF 2.1.
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nothing wrong with it as long as you don't tell anyone "we're an open source project".
You have no idea how often that argument was had, even leading to there being a page that ultimately explained 'why we think we're open'. For a long time I actually found myself agreeing with the philosophy, but that was before I got out and about and developed stuff in other communities over the last 2-3 years.
When we unite against a common enemy that attacks our ethos, it nurtures group solidarity. Trolls are sensational, yes, but we keep everyone honest. | Game Memorial

AngelinaBelle

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Re: To fork or not to fork - in other words: Hi :)
« Reply #33, on August 12th, 2011, 09:37 PM »
I think the ex-devs were right to insist on the change to BSD. At this point in time, I think it will be a positive change for the SMF community and SMF. SMF's old license was chosen at the moment YaBB SE was becoming SMF, because of the team's concern over a real case of someone taking YaBB SE code, repackaging it without attribution, and including it in a for-pay package. It seemed like the best choice to the team at the time.

I know the move to an open SVN has been slower than the SMF dev team, SMF afficionados, or any open-source advocate, would like to see. That's a valid criticism. There is some cultural change required. It's one thing to be in favor of a BSD license.  It's another to be used to working in a more open environment.  And the SMF team is reluctant to store project stuff on "somebody else's server" because of issues from the YaBB SE days.

Change comes slowly.
I'm an SMF doc writer.

Arantor

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Re: To fork or not to fork - in other words: Hi :)
« Reply #34, on August 12th, 2011, 09:54 PM »
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It seemed like the best choice to the team at the time.
Knowing as I do what happened of the forks of YaBBSE, of SuperMod and especially ttForum, I'm not especially surprised of the general reaction to forks.

The difference is that we're still respecting the terms of the licence (unlike ttForum, which just did a copy/paste of every mention of YaBBSE name and copyrights) and we aren't just grabbing a bunch of mods and shoving them in (unlike SuperMod, we're implementing features ourselves from fresh)

You're right that change comess slowly, but how long does it take? Wedge is almost one year old, is that not enough time for example? It's like a standing joke about the old national railway here in the UK, showed reputation for punctuality wasn't the very best, so much so that they acknowledged it by changing their slogan to "We're getting there." with the intimation that they had every intention of improvement but never managed to deliver.

I'd love to see SMF adopt a stable development cycle and start on the long road back to being nearer the top of the list than the bottom, but it needs to show some signs of change, right now it looks[1] as though development has mostly stagnated, the last commit that's referenced on Mantis is a month ago, and there isn't any indication of what 2.1 will look like. We've indicated where we're going, as has MyBB with 2.0, as well as XenForo's forthcoming 1.1, but I think SMF needs to step up and do the same.
 1. I am aware that there IS progress. But to an outsider, this is how it looks.

Nao

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Nao

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Nao

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Nao

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Arantor

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Nao

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Arantor

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