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Fink Maintainer Steps Down Due To GPL Infringment

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the dirty-rotten-mac-os-x-users dept.

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.

3 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. His resignation say otherwise. by victim · · Score: 5, Interesting
    He lists the following reasons for resigning...
    • Tired of unappreciative people.
    • Tired of people who think they are owed immediate support.
    • Tired of being yelled at by above people.
    • Tired of people that complain about bugs but won't help fix. note: you do not need to be a coder to help fix. testers and analyzers are always handy
    • Tired of defending decisions.
    • Tired of people using the mailing list instead of the docs.
    • Tired of working with people that make money off of other peoples work without credit. here we get to some of the headline.
    • Tired of working with some specific offenders of the above.
    • Tired of spending every waking hour on fink.
    • repeat variations of the above some more...


    Sounds more like just plain tired than GPL violations, but then I'm not a slashdot media spinner.

    Christoph deserves a great big THANKS from the world of computer users. I have worked on similar ports to other processors and it is mind numbing tedious work that stretches to the horizon and beyond. Every day you know that you will spend it fixing bugs in a dozen programs, bugs that will range from the trivial to the near impossible to find.

    You do not plan and execute your plan as in the development of a program. You work your way down the list of unwashed packages, build them, test them, fix them and check them off only to find more packages added to the list than you checked off that day. Most of the packages you won't give a rat's ass about, but you do them because someone, somewhere will be wanting it.

    Take a break Christoph. Get caught up in school, then when that itch returns create another wonderful thing.
  2. I dunno... by update() · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There's definitely some tension between the mac world and the Open Source and GPL worlds. Certain amounts of culture clash are inevitable...

    There's certainly some clashing between the Mac and Unix worlds (the iTunes installer issue was probably caused by that kind of mutual ignorance) but Apple and proprietary developers have generally gotten along well with the BSD and gcc people as far as license issues go.

    The problems described here don't strike me as being a Mac vs free software conflict. They sound a lot more like the stuff Linux developers have been dealing with for the last few years -- LinuxOne-style abuse of redistribution and self-absorbed users who think that because you gave them something you work for them.

  3. Never claimed as a GPL violation by barberio · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hardly ever post comments to Slashdot, but this time I'm going to.

    This article steps over the line and into libal. OpenOSX is not violating the GPL, it never was, and it wasnt even acused of doing so. What did happen is that Pfisterer thought that every redistributor who used Gimp and Frink should point out that he's responsable. Which may seam reasionable, but the problem is you have lots of contributors behind gimp, do they all get credits on the web page and promotional material? Or do you do what *every* other distribution does, and put the READMEs and CONTRIBUTORs files in the documentation and source.

    Acusing OpenOSX of violating the GPL on a high trafic site like this is going to damage them a lot. How about an apology for publishing something that was flat wrong? its what I'd expect from a real news source.

    What have OpenOSX done wrong? Sell open source software CDs at a high mark up, RedHat does that.

    As a long time reader of Slashdot, I'm getting fed up of the Tabloid instincts being shown, and I'd like the Editorial Staff to Grow Up and show some Responsability.