-1, with TL;DR below I feel straw poll is a more accurate and beneficial way of looking at this, since the call for a vote is really a request on behalf of the thread "Re: [VOTE] Bloodhound to join the Incubator" [1] so ultimately any Trac dev and community participation should come under its own governance as to whether the call to vote is at all the thing to do in such an occassion or overall how to respond to the Bloodhound fork proposal, and in fact, the governance of Trac and correspondence with third parties us up to the Trac stakeholders. As osimons points out [2] (my interpretation), the professed logic of David Richards regarding "...we decided that our contribution should be as part of a larger, independent entity." is, at best, both a questionable assumption and one that has been followed by questionable actions and has no way illustrated that this course is best for any community or for software in general. On the other hand, I find the logic of "Trac is BSD-licensed and it is everyones right to fork Trac if they really want to." to be largely inapplicable. Of course everyone has the right to fork FOSS, but that doesn't mean that they should. Since the vote was solicited on whether they should, this is what my vote is respect to.
That said, I cannot in good faith say that I am still a member of the Trac community so anything I say is from the perspective of a guy that did a lot of plugins work a few years ago [3] that now works for Mozilla and does not work on or maintain Trac in any meaningful way. I care about the project, in the abstract, though to be honest Trac suffers from many of the symptoms that make it hard to get involved in any OSS community. Mozilla does too. I care a lot about open source software and generally associate forking without the intention to upstream (which, as best I can tell, cboos interprets correctly in https://groups.google.com/d/msg/trac-dev/kMVFq9pkfus/eYMCVfqyUwkJ ) as real failures in the OSS ecosystem and that I fear leads to corporate and other moneyed stakeholder control of "open" source software. That is what I fear here. Though, to be honest, I don't fear it much. I don't forsee a long term success for the bloodhound project without interest and collaboration with Trac developers. There will be some initial interest, maybe even some tech press, but long term viability? I honestly doubt the project has enough commitment to maintain an issue tracker (and all the other things Trac does) to really get (pun not intended) traction. If they did, they wouldn't start the conversation with a fork. For one that is just rude. For another, since OSS is ultimately about cultivating ecosystems, it is a serious blow to that. Does .* have the right to fork Trac? Yes [4]. But I would prefer if they didn't. ---- [1] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/201112.mbox/%3CCAJjMeYNPPVT4sBOUo3VcUq8c=d1ap5hurwp+w7yq1mnckfh...@mail.gmail.com%3E [2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/trac-dev/kMVFq9pkfus/Xa5ivikBAF0J [3] http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/k0s [4] Within legal limits -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Development" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/trac-dev/-/0-5ZwmSeQfAJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/trac-dev?hl=en.
