On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > A.k.a. "we had to destroy the project in order to save it". > > http://technogems.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/pyjamas-hijacked.html
Great summary, very handily peppered with links to appropriate posts. > Seriously, this was a remarkably ham-fisted and foolish way to "resolve" > a dispute over the direction of an open source project. That's the sort > of thing that gives open source a bad reputation. I'd probably be on the side of the dissidents in terms of philosophy - freedom is there to be used, but if it costs you too much (effort, quality, etc) to use all-free-software, the cart's involved in equine artistry. You want a wiki? Throw down MySQL and MediaWiki. Want hosting? GitHub is fine. I don't restrict my hardware purchases to "free BIOS or no sale". But a backstabbing takeover is not doing anyone any good. Especially not the reputation of the project. Here at work we have some familiarity with Python, and my boss is just starting to learn Javascript (after our main JS developer left); but there's no way that I'm going to consider introducing pyjamas / pyjs until this is resolved. > (The sad thing is, when closed source software developers do this sort of > thing, it gets blamed on "bad apples"; when open source developers do it, > it gets used as an indictment on the entire FOSS community.) It's not quite as mixed-standards as that. If you see Microsoft or Apple charging a fortune for trivial upgrades and/or bug fixes, you blame it on corporate development. And some low-quality software in the FOSS market is acknowledged as "you get what you pay for", although that one can backfire too. But yes, it's a harsh reality that one open-source community's actions reflect badly on another. (Which is why I want to be really REALLY careful of using the term "open source" here at work. Just because we let people have the source code to certain scripts etc does not mean we should use that term. Just sayin'.) I hope that pyjamas can be restored at some point to a single live project. Whether that's headed by Luke Leighton or C Anthony Risinger (neither of whom I know at all and thus I can't speak to either's merits) or someone else, I don't particularly care, but frankly, I don't think there's need in the world for a fork of such a project. Aside from philosophical disagreements, what would be the differences between the Luke fork and the Anthony fork? Could anyone explain, to a prospective user, why s/he should pick one or the other? If not, the projects need to merge, or else one will die a sad death of stagnation. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list