Fink Maintainer Steps Down Due To GPL Infringment

DShadow noted that the Fink maintainer Christoph Pfisterer has resigned largely because of GPL violations by openosx and macgimp, as well as macosx.forked.net. There's definitely some tension between the mac world and the Open Source and GPL worlds. Certain amounts of culture clash are inevitable, but hopefully great projects like this will continue, and commercial vendors will be able to play nice without alienating developers. The good news for Macheads is that fink will continue just fine.

Comments

Weenies

[Large Green Mallard]

Christoph Pfisterer seems like quite the weenie from his email exchange. OpenOSX is just trying to make things easier for people. It's not like they've gone out of their way to anonomize Fink and change its name.

Are the creators of RPMs forced to give credit to the writers of bash or csh because their programs use these languages to run post/preinstall scripts? Of course not. If you're just using a program to install another program, and the installer program is based on the GPL, don't be expecting to get damn credits all over the packaging.

In the email exchange posted by Christoph Pfisterer (no less), Josha looks like he's being quite reasonable and that it's actually Christoph Pfisterer being a pillock.

Re:Weenies

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are missing the point of Christoph's complaint. It wasn't that he wrote a program and somebody used it without mentioning it. What Jeshua did was took essentially a whole Fink distribution, intentionally removed references to the Fink project in it, and sold the distribution on CDs, with the inference that it was his own work. It would be as if I took a snapshot of Debian unstable, removed all references to the Debian project I could find, then sold CDs of the distribution under a different name with no attribution to the Debian project. It wouldn't be illegal, but it certainly would be wrong.

What's worse is that when Jeshua got caught, he didn't fully own up to what he had done. Instead, he tried to weasel out of it by claiming ignorance about Fink. And although he did put up a link to Fink on his web page, he still does not attribute anything to Fink nor acknowledge that he's basically selling a Fink CD. The guy is a leech.

For the best.

[Enahs]

It's pretty obvious that Cristoph is screaming "sour grapes" and doesn't fully understand the GPL.

In his email, he mentions releasing, say, Red Hat Linux with a few changes and no mention of RH, which would be okay. Not nice, but okay.

Can anyone point out the GPL violation, or is this another Slashdot fuckup?