Imagine the following situation: You're a volunteer who donated months of his spare time, and thus months of his life, to write a plugin for a piece of software.
Then someone comes along, and demands the parent piece of software to be rewritten from scratch. Maybe because he doesn't like it, maybe because $programming_language != $cool_language_of_the_year. This would render your plugin useless, as your Java module can't be fixed to load into the C rewrite. We can assume that any human will be interested in his work of months or even years not being thrown away. So as a volunteer, you will be interested in finding a way to keep your module loading. The rewrite could go down one of the following paths, with different things you'll have to do to keep your module usable: A) The fork replaces the original software. It takes over its name, its website, its mailing lists, its IRC channel, etc. You, as someone interested in the original software, have to fork the original pre-write software so you can continue to provide your module loadable into it. You have to set up a new website, new mailing lists, IRC channels, etc., just to keep the original software alive. B) The one who wants to do a rewrite "forks" the project, i.e. develops the rewrite on his own. New name, new software. The original project continues its development as is. The rewrite happens elsewhere. You don't need to do *anything* to keep your plugin working, as the original project still exists. The rewriter has the burden of setting up infrastructure for his fork. He sets up a website, mailing lists, etc. You're not concerned. Which approach is more polite towards our example volunteer who spend months writing code for the original software? B obviously, as it doesn't cause any work for him. I would go as far as saying that "fork does not replace original project" is actually always the real situation anyway: You cannot force people to stop working on a GPL software. Any full rewrite is de-facto a different software. Thus, how about this new etiquette rule for the mailing lists, IRC, etc.: If discussions about rewriting Freenet happen again, we ask people politely to conduct them on the communication channels of their fork; not on ours. We're not responsible for providing infrastructure for their projects, and this includes discussion space. I know this is sort of passive aggressive, but I don't think we're doing ourselves a favor with letting the rewrite discussions happen: They might be an intentional attack by the NSA [1]: Disturb developers so much with outrageous demands that they spent 100% of their time in discussing with the attacker; and 0% on writing code. All it takes to conduct this attack is an email address (= $ 0) and a few hours of a bored student (= $a_few_beers). In fact the discussions are already growing so large that they could consume 100% of my worktime if I tried to reply to all mails. To avoid another huge discussion, I would recommend you reply with a simple vote: "Yes, let's change the rules to disallow rewrite discussions." or "No please don't." Greetings & thanks for reading [1] http://draketo.de/english/freenet/de-orchestrating-phk
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