-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Apologies for taking up list traffic with this, but I feel I must correct this public assertion.
On Tue, 18 June 2002, C Falconer wrote: > *cough* minor correction... The smartnet server was written by an > employee of the company now known as Flashnet. The Smartnet server is a > fork of the original server. BTW both run on Linux. *cough* Unique interpretation of the word "fork" there. A bit of a background. A long time ago, back when I was a student at Canty, I did a little bit of "consultancy" (which is inflating it somewhat :) ) for a company called Smart Computer Systems. We deployed small Linux boxen to do shared Internet access, fairly basic stuff at that. Just a copy Slackware running Squid and Sendmail. Smart Computer Systems was, at that stage, several largely seperate people trading as the same name. Effectively, I was employed by them seperately. After a, er, "disagreement" with one of my employers, I stopped working for them, and continued to work for the other parts of Smart Computer Systems. At that stage they all still traded under the same name, but they don't now. The party I stopped working for is now marketing their solutions as Flashnet. A considerable time later (in fact, after I'd also stopped working for the Smartnet people, but only because I'd left uni and taken a job in another city), Smartnet was born. It was, to the best of my knowledge, developed independently of anything Flashnet were doing, It certainly wasn't based on any work I'd done back then. A fork, by definition, is a split of source code. Installing Linux for other people is not a "fork". Certainly when I was still working for the Flashnet people very little code was written, and what was written was at best a few shell scripts to make life slightly easier, and wasn't even put under a licence which would allow it to be forked. Nor did I take any code with me when I left. Since no code was actually forked, to call Smartnet a fork of Flashnet is, IMO, an extraordinary claim. They are, as far as I know, completely seperately developed products. I also don't accept that they are a fork in the sense that I was involved in deploying early revisions of both. They were, as I've stated above, simple Linux installs with a little shell glue. Next someone will claim my Linux installs where I work are a fork of Flashnet! After all, they've got some shell glue as well.. :) - -- David Zanetti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.75-6 iD8DBQE9DuosT21+qRy4P+QRAo1AAJ9ciYIyZktIVZbJa/79Bd61KI0I8ACg2sC4 h0WSUnfJeNgE6LKM8TRKn/k= =SUm0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
