Peter Simons schrieb:
Let me summarize the statements you made in your e-mail:
Oh my... no phone call then.
Let me inject a short paragraph to the casual reader: flame wars are nothing atypical in the opensource world, in fact it is thought of being quite helpful as to clean up things and it can often help clearing the minds of the contenders - and possibly leading to better cooperation on the actual subject, the project work. Many items spring up from the thin communication lines that the internet presents - lots of what is `intended` or `done in error` happens to be just speculation. These however are picked up and made up into proper accusations, possibly extended with `evidence` material. Such a thread usually meanders quite a time until the silent readers of the mailinglist - and mostly partakers in the original autoconf project - are fed up and make some noise themselves which usually ends the discussion quickly thereafter. In the current `case`, atleast four points are presented and summed with a speech as to what that points at. I have some `evidence` as well in my pocket which was not mentioned to this point publically, - but there is hope that the flaming can be ended more quickly with the help of another argument chain that follows up this quote:
I have no intention whatsoever of trying to "resolve" this issue. I do not want to discuss this matter to a much greater extend than I did already. It feels nice to have gotten this off my chest, finally, but it is childish nonetheless. [...] I did release the archive's infrastructure under the GPL license and I am perfectly prepared for people to do with it whatever they want to as long as they obey the license. It is not necessary for me to _like_ what they do with it.
Yes, putting work under GPL means to let it get extended by other people - they can just take it even without asking. But that still works out in the end since the original maintainer is always free to take back, to pick up the material that was created by the other one - the GPL ensures that all additions and modifications are free to do such, even without asking, again. It goes both ways. We see the effect that `merging` of projects is quite a natural situation in the gnu world, there is nothing like longstanding forks and branches since there is no point in doing doublework as it happens to be with the maintainance of a common subset of the two parts. What I am pointing at: it is your own free will to not take any benefit from the sfnet efforts, to diminish the work that is presented there, to talk aggressivly about the other author of those works, and culminate that there is no point in resolving the issue, perhaps as you just do not see anything worth in the sfnet part (and possibly neither its author). Many people have come to respect the works of the sfnet branch and while you were starting your own extensions I was here on the autoconf list, present to answer questions and to point to possible solutions from the ac-archive. Surely, I did use the link to the sfnet one since I knew it was up to date while it became a common case the the gnu part was possibly a few weeks thereafter. As a result, more and more of the other people on the autoconf mailing list did start to pick the sfnet branch when showing references to ac-archive macros themselves. Perhaps it did look to some as if the gnu site was not maintained in the way that people might expect, and which they can get from the sfnet branch. I was hoping that this effect lead to you to strengthen your efforts with the gnu site. That would have wiped the sfnet branch off the internet for it can not catch up - it is in a minor position anyway since the main autoconf site does point to the gnu ac-archive alone, and you did never install a link to the sfnet branch either even that you promised to do that, a year ago. It is therefore interesting to see the sfnet branch is actually able to be seen as a competitor by you that you need to come down badly on. I am very dissatisfied that there is less hope in seeing the two parts merged back anytime soon. Hopefully you can work out a way for you to finally come to terms with me and the "Rest of the world" that you involve in the subject of this thread. The task should be cooperation, and that means communications, and there was not enough of the latter during the last year, and it is good that finally you started to talk about it, even when that is done in public instead of doing it directly between you and me, just presenting the results to the autoconf mailinglist. best wishes, guido
