Hoi,
You make accusations and they fall flat. You say that the Okawix software is
not GPL and it is. You say that the software is proprietary and, because of
a lack of communication with YOUR project you call them proprietary... I
call it preposterous. When they want to fork, they have every right to do
so. Given that by your own admission YOUR code has a file format that is not
fixed but you ask people to conform to your standard ??? By the definitions
of the GPL it is exactly your actions that make the software you champion
proprietary!
Really, you should know better then spout FUD in this way. The sad thing is
what you are saying is enough to land you in court because it looks to me
like slander.
When I read your story, I find that you insist on other people doing as you
say. You may have the best intentions but you cannot compel people in this
way. They are a fork, they are GPL software, they care about
internationalisation and their localisation is done at translatewiki.net. At
that they are ahead of you.
In my opinion you owe the list an apology for your inacurate and
inconsiderate accusations.
Thanks,
GerardM
2009/9/3 Manuel Schneider <[email protected]>
> Hoi Gerard,
>
> it is indeed a huge improvement that finally the source code was made
> available. This has not yet came to my sight. So GPL violation does not
> count
> here.
>
> Anyway, it took a long time to actually become free. When we were trying to
> work with Linterweb it took us months to get some patches of the code they
> took from us, and the patches were actually not usable.
>
> Concerning proprietary format:
> Zeno was kind of proprietary, but at least it existed some documentation
> and
> DirectMedia was willing to answer questions.
> ZIM is completely open and freely documented, so if you don't like our
> implementation or you think that C++ is not the language of your choice -
> feel free and go ahead with your own implementation.
> As long as you follow the standard!
>
> Of course the file format is not fixed until good right now, so if you have
> suggestions you could name them on the openZIM mailinglist or file a bug at
> the openZIM website.
>
> What Linterweb did was just changing random thing without documentation and
> very bad communication towards the openZIM project team. So I do consider
> it
> as proprietary - as it is incompatible with both ZIM and Zeno and there is
> no
> willingnes to collaborate to fix this issue.
>
> Both Tommi (the openZIM main developer who has also delivered his
> Zeno-related
> code to Linterweb) and Emmanuel (from whom they took Kiwix to make it
> Okawix)
> have a long story to tell about this.
> As well as I have, because I am being addressed regularly by Linterweb as
> they
> still try to get code and support, but never really get into the project by
> telling us what they really want and how we could integrate that into
> openZIM.
>
> We had a Wikipedia Offline meeting in Buenos Aires and someone named
> Linterweb. Surprisingly for me they are also quite wellknown to the
> foundation and more surprisingly they have quite similar views as we have.
>
> I would love to see them using ZIM in Okawix, even if it would require some
> changes if they feel we had to make it more usable for them (even though I
> see currently no reason why it was not perfectly usable right now).
> Of course we invited Linterweb to our first developers meeting and two
> people
> from them actually registered (one of them was Pascal Martin, the CEO) so
> we
> book rooms for them from our project's budget, but they never showed up. A
> side story though, but it is an excellent example how collaboration with
> Linterweb is going on.
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Manuel
> --
> Regards
> Manuel Schneider
>
> Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
> Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge
> www.wikimedia.ch
>
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