On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 10:28:33AM +0300, thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi wrote: > > As for the topic brought up here, I sense a bit of sentimentalism > > clouding the technical judgment of some. > (...) > > In a positive creative development structure you leave the contributors > > their freedom. > > > > "Contribute your planes!" rather than "Come to Gitorious, ask for our > > permission to get your repository, work under our supervision! Work, > > work, my busy bees, and make us planes for our big master-repository!" > You can also offer your work as part of 'The Flightgear Project'. Once you > decide to do so, it is no longer your freedom to do what you want with > your work - it is under the control of 'The Flightgear Project', you may > have to compromise, you can't choose your license,.... But you get > something in return for giving up that freedom - you get to use the > official Flightgear infrastructure (you aircraft will be for download on > the official page, others test compatibility, other developers may take > care of your work when you're not around, others will feel responsible to > provide support if they can,...).
This is exactly the "deal" which I think you are rather hurting yourself with. I allege, that contributers of planes are not looking to make a deal with you, at least I would not. What you are offering them, is what *every* contributor should be entitled to in the first place. "You only get to be on our download page if you surrender your autonomy to us"? What are you trying to achieve? Do you really think anyone would readily change their mind to rather publish their plane as GPL, although they'd prefer not to, and give up their autonomy, although they'd prefer not to, to get a "goodie" from you? Again: What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to promote GPL by sanctioning people for not using it? Or is it only about some personal pride thing, and you don't want to feel exploited by those, who contribute (that sounds ridicolous enough as it stands)? > > You seem to entertain the idea of a free lunch - get the goodies which > being part of the Flightgear project has to offer, but keeping the freedom > to do what you want. That may be a positive creative development structure > from your personal point of view, but certainly not for everyone else who > is then supposed to provide infrastructure for you. If you consider those, who contribute planes, "looking for a free lunch", I seriously must wonder what kind of attitude you presume in an open source project. What is that "lunch" exactly? The fame, perhaps? And instead of considering listing even non-GPL planes on the main-page a good thing for Flightgear, you rather wish to deprive those who contributed them of their "fame"? > > it's just common sense that there has to be a balance between give and > take whenever people interact and work together. Again, I can't help it but wonder what image you have in mind when you accuse those, who voluntarily make planes for Flightgear, of "taking from you but not giving back". I can't even imagine what your opinion of people who only use Flightgear, and develop neither code nor planes for it, must be... And as for > other developers may take care of your work when you're not around, > others will feel responsible to provide support if they can,...). I think we have sufficiently seen how other people's work is taken care of after they leave. And how much it helps in this regard, that the planes are forced under the hood of GPL and subjected to your authority, your restrictions. I think old, abandoned planes will equally, if not more likely be willingly taken over by others, if they are not forced into a master-repo. > This has nothing to do with what technical possibilities GIT offers, > or what GIT is about Yes, it has everything to do with what Git(orious) is about. Because Gitorious demonstrates what a sustainable, distributed development structure works like, and your suggestion is nothing like that. You completely misregard fundamental properties of distributed development, such as cloning and branching. Your desire to patronize the other developers may be more fit for core and code development, but the development of planes differs substantially from that of the core: Planes are contributed modularily, have no strong interaction amonst eachother and can thus be contributed freely, as in the freedom to contribute or not. If you like to obtain authority over a plane, cloning it into your own repository will allow you to call it your own, while you can still savour the development the author makes. And if the author seems to abandon the plane or changes things of which you disapprove, branching will allow you to continue development as if it had always been your own. > > So, if you like your complete freedom, you can't be part of a > collaborative project. It's as simple as that, being part of a bigger > project always implies giving up that complete freedom. No one gives up any freedom here, since it's their free and voluntary will to contribute or not. You are only tightening the restrictions and thus make it less likely for someone to contribute at all. A collaborative, open and free project means, at the very least, conforming to the project's requirements, technically and possibly socially. But this is only the consequence, and logically not a justification for imposing such requirements; which is what you do here, without any valid justification. regards, ManDay > > Cheers, > > * Thorsten (R) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-oct _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
