On the Ethics of a Code Split?

McWizard asks: "We've recently had a code split at a project I'm leading. (No name given, as this is a question, not an advertisement campaign). While both projects have done some major design decisions in opposing directions, we've been keeping a close eye on the changelog of the spinoff for small changes that could be used. So, whenever we've found an interesting piece of code (mostly GUI stuff, nothing longer than 20 lines of code), we transferred it to our project and gave credit to the spinoff team in the changelog. What does Slashdot say on that matter? Is this unethical or are such things fair game?" "Yesterday, I was contacted by the leader of the spinoff project who told me that he's quiet angry at us for doing that and that it's considered unethical and rude to copy code from the spinoff. As both projects are under the GPL, we have an opposing opinion on that matter and we've more than once invited him to copy code from our project. Nevertheless he's thinking about obfuscating his changelog and only open the source as packages when he's doing a release, which is, as he says, his right under the GPL."

Comments

No problem

[perlionex]

Legally, there's nothing wrong since both projects are GPL'ed (I presume).

Ethically, I don't see anything wrong with it. In the end, it's your design decisions that are going to make a difference, which is why the code split in the first place. In fact, there's no reason why both projects shouldn't take code from each other; if there are common areas where there's actually no disagreement, this will help to reduce duplication of effort.

Re:Forks are quite common

[norwoodites]

The maintainer of gcc at that time was one person, Kenner, who said everytime someone submitted a patch, he would do a better patch next week. That is the reason for the split. Overly conservative is not the world for this, it was just plain stupid and a political mess.

And it was more than just the cygnus people, it was also IBM and the fortran maintainer and other people too (yes IBM was involved with GCC before 1999) who founded EGCS, see about some of the history of EGCS project and GCC.

SSP is also called propolice. The writter of it submitted it against a release branch which was the main reason why it got rejected and it was too big to review.