Wedge

What were the original terms?

All I'm seeing now, is that they're willing to discuss any "open source" forks... But once again they're not linking to Wedge (spelt as "wedge" there) in the topic with the list of forks.

(It's always funny, considering that if I hadn't announced Nightwish's fork on Wedge, it wouldn't be listed over there in the first place :lol:)

Now, when it comes to their 'open source' clause. Do they include Wedge in it or not? That's the interesting question.

If they do, then good, you can skip the rest.

If they don't, they're being hypocritical on several levels.
1/ Wedge is the most advanced of all known existing forks. It's bound to eventually become the most discussed piece of software on that board...
2/ Just have a look at the Internet Archive.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090618104338/http://www.simplemachines.org/about/opensource.php

The very last sentence says, "But see our software as Open Source."
That's about the SMF 1.x license. Which is the same one we've based the Wedge license on.

When you consider your own software to be open source, and you refuse to discuss another software that has the exact same license because "it's not open source", then it's hypocritical. And if they eventually change their terms to say 'not BSD', that means they've read this, proving they didn't write their terms out of some 'reasonable' discussion based on facts, but simply on the fact that we're the ones doing the fork. It's up to them to show they're actually cool about us. Otherwise when do they expect the hostility to cease?

Just my 2 cents!

Technically Wedge has the *old* licence, not BSD. But the choice of wording is hilarious. It isn't that we've not expressed an interest in BSD, we have actively said not BSD to start with, not until the code is far enough along that they can't just duplicate it, at least in my mind. Yes, it's petty but given the history it shouldn't be surprising that we're not just going to compromise for their benefit one last time.

The whole rules of that board should have just said not to discuss Wedge, it probably would have been more honest.[1]

Just one more thing: they knew full well neither of us could post over there anyway, which does make it a farce; Nao is post banned, I don't have an account, and if I did, the odds are it would be a shared account which would then be seen as circumventing a ban and subsequently banned in itself.

1.

Does anyone seriously believe that if we go BSD, or Creative Commons as I've mused about recently, that they will welcome discussion of Wedge with open arms? Will they bollocks, but there is a part of me wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt for some strange reason.[1]  1.  I have little doubt that this is part if their way of rationalising "attempting to listen to our feedback" but like multiple other things, I get the feeling of having totally missed the point.

Baby steps everyone...baby steps. I, personally, would like to see Wedge as a focal point of discussion over there. I can see there are a lot of emotions running high but I'd like to see everyone come together at some point.I do, yes.

What I think they want to avoid is the back and forth an accusations etc from both sides. You guys know full well that years of poor guidance will take some time reverse.

So, are they going to unban Nao so he can participate then?

Well, I am clearly not a team member over there but I can certainly poke around and see what's up. Also, sent you guys a PM.

I don't know as the board seems very newly created, but the Marketing guru edited AngelinaBelle's original post of the rules.

What a marvelous idea!

On behalf of the SMF team, I cordially invite Nao and Arantor and Wedge team to give notice that the Wedge project will go with a BSD[1] or similar license. And then make a showcase post on the fork discussion board.

Of course, some tempers will flare. They always do. That's why I've been trying to recruit a good neutral moderator for that board, to keep things as friendly as possible.

As an aside -- my apologies for my typo in the first post to the Fork Discussion board at simplemachines.org.  I have fixed it.  You can tell me these things, of course.  I am not a "they".

1.

We know that the SMF team went with the BSD license precisely because "they" thought that the "old SMF license" was not as open as it should have been. It was adopted in 2006, because the GPL license did not seem to be providing enough protection to YaBB SE (I am recently learning SMF history).  But it is history now, only attached to deprecated versions of SMF, and to YaBB SE 1.5.1.

I cordially invite any and all members of the SMF team to actually read what we have said time and time and time and time again. We are using the SMF licence that the team declared was in their view an open source licence, and for us to be decried as not open because of that seems to me to be a double standard.

The reason for the switch to BSD was not because 'it's a good idea'. The team didn't exactly have a lot of choice in that discussion and had the choice not been forced on them by the original copyright holders, I doubt the team would have moved to BSD until the next version of SMF.

Anyway, that's beside the point. The fact is you've made it pretty clear that non open source works are not welcome even when they would completely and in all meaningful ways comply with the licence as stated. The fact that we have chosen not to go to a true open source licence is to protect our investment of time from being abused by a group of people that were more than happy to make use of our contributions all the time we were contributing them but were stonewalling us as soon as the contributions stopped flowing.

Never mind that Nao worked on the single most popular mod for SMF in its history. Never mind that I wrote the helpdesk in use on their site. Never mind that I made tens of thousands of posts supporting the project. These things don't matter, of course, but god forbid that we should be recognised for all that effort, and instead are just demonised because we don't want to have our work used by the same group of self serving bureaucrats that don't employ the same standards they expect others to adhere to.

Those devs thought the BSD license was a better idea than the "old SMF" license, for a number of reasons. They were the "they" who made that change happen. They were SMF team members and former SMF team members.

The BSD license is the single standard license at simplemachines.org. The old license is only attached to deprecated versions of SMF.

Change is difficult, but it happens.

As Arantor might now, posts like that are usually written on the team boards, and then moved to a public board - such was the case here, and AFAIK Kindred did the moving. Most probably the title needed to be edited, out of WIP, and thus the edit by Kindred to the rules...

Like I said, it's beside the point who made it happen. The main reason I even mentioned it is to clear up the inaccuracy you mentioned and to ensure that if you are going to argue your case that you do so on solid ground, and not from some rose tinted view of things.

Yes, I figured it had been round the team boards first. We do that sometimes, too.

I love how certain supporters of this policy (like someone who doesn't adhere to the licence of a mod he was using) are active in discussing it.

The bottom line, folks, is this: open source encourages sharing of ideas, which is a wonderful thing. What is not so wonderful is when the sharing of things goes into code without respect for the time and effort that went into it.

For example, I am aware that the SMF project wanted, and for all I know still does want, to take control of SimpleDesk so it can be developed. Initially they weren't even going to ask me, but when I found out, I made it very clear that the only way that could happen is if they forked it. Guess what did not happen, despite it being BSD and always was. These are the people that I do not want to give any further access to what I produce, having been shown that they're only interested in it for what they can get, which does not include ideas but finished code that they can use.

Still, in all honesty I doubt there is much about Wedge that the SMF team would find that useful, after all they have repeatedly demonstrated that they aren't that interested in looking forwards. For example, one of the dev team won't even use 2.0 for their own sites because they prefer how 1.1 does permissions and would rather stick with that than understand how they really work and what the benefits of doing it in 2.0 actually are.

We will go BSD or CC, but as and when we are ready, not because we're bowing to your request and certainly not because we want to be showcased in your little recognition booth. We will just go BSD as and when SMF can't directly use our code and would have to do some of the work themselves in making use of the ideas presented, though most of them are far too controversial for SMF's conservative view of itself.

Oh, my last post was mostly directed at Snape actually, to answer the question of what was "tweaked"...

Was busy tonight (IRL, and the little time I had, I spent on doing and committing revision 932), so I'll have to skip this topic (and all others) for today and deal with them tomorrow. Sorry about that. (Pete seems to be doing fine by himself though :P)

I was under the impression that Kindred's tweak(s) were to fix typos, nothing substantial.I'm doing fine, just pissed off that every time something happens where I think there's been a breakthrough, something else happens to take it back two steps at the same time.