I stand corrected - sorry about that.
On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 20:07, David Zanetti wrote: > -----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----- >
