Slashdot Mirror
How To Kill an Open Source Project With New Funding
mir42 writes "The OpenSource multimedia authorware project Sophie, formerly hosted by USC Los Angeles, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization, Mellon Foundation, approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal, which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Sophie. Being an OpenSource project, this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub-contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid-off developers started OpenSophie.org trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version. Have others faced similar situations? How would you deal with a situation like this?"
Is this a legit question being asked at the end of the story? Or is this whole article a thinly veiled attempt to editorialize about an event the author disagrees with in an effort to drum up community support for his/her project?
It seems like Slashdot is being used as a hammer here, instead of just the normal server-blasting time waster we all signed up for. I don't like being used.
What exactly is the problem here? The old devs don't like something about the new project(the summary isn't clear what, and there's no article with more information), so they've forked it. Who exactly killed what?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I dunno what the deal is... sounds completely legit to me. There's nothing in the GPL, or in F/OSS in general, that says that if you write something, someone else cannot come along with a better story, more money, more developers, etc. and take your code or even forking it out from under you and taking control of the project. They can also start selling support for it and making money off of it (even without additional development... just support it).
So you have something open source.
Someone takes it, throws money at it, and tries to do something with it.
This pisses you off, because they now have the resources to one up you on the project.
Excuse my ignorance, but I thought open source was supposed to be open and free so it would allow anyone to evaluate, use, improve upon, etc. a project, with the end result being better stuff for everyone.
If this company put up money to do something with a base they saw as promising, then they're doing exactly what open source is all about.
If your code/project is not covered by any license that forces them to keep it open source / attribute credit to you, that's your fault.
It seems to me your e-peen got butt hurt, and you're crying foul.
Someone was apparently not happy with the current developers and gave the next job to someone else.
Dude, you had your chance. You blew it. By your own admission "As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow" you programmed and released shit.
"Someone does nothing but copy the existing output and claim it's a new direction, and bamboozling the funding organization into giving them the new grant".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Someone takes it, throws money at it, and tries to do something with it.
Except according to the OP they're not taking anything, they're re-implementing it from scratch in Java using the current UI as a guide. And it's Carnegie Mellon that's putting up the money, and who were (apparently) providing support for the original project.
Now that's not unreasonable, if there were problems with the original that CM couldn't resolve... for example, if the FOSS software wasn't going anywhere and they needed something that worked (which was my first thought reading the article). And, after all, it's not like there are no FOSS projects that have done the same thing (though if they target another FOSS project rather than a commercial one you tend to get some bad blood). On the other hand, it's possible that the Bulgarians pulled an end-run around the people at CM who knew what was going on and got some PHB to pull the plug on the FOSS project.
We don't know, and it's better to avoid jumping to conclusions... either that Sophie was stabbed in the back by the Bulgarians, or that Sophie was adrift at sea and the Bulgarians rescued it... without more information.
It's not illegal. You obviously think your project is better than theirs, so act like it. I suggest you spend less time whining that someone "stole" your idea (if you wanted to keep it, why did you make it Open anyhow?) and more time writing good software .
Whichever software is truly more useful to people will get used, and people will hear about it.
Grow a pair and get to work.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
First off, wtf is Sophie? Their page says it is "software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment" and I am still as clueless as before? What does it do? I tried reading their user manual and gave up. It is utterly unclear. As best I can figure, they were making some sort of bastardized office suite. If so, why? Isn;t there enough of that already?
As for the question in the summary, what is their license? Both for the original project and for what this company is developing. Just saying open source is not enough when you are dealing with a fork.
That's about the fastest way to kill a project, yes.
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From the description, it sounds like a fork is getting all the monetary attention - not unheard of.
Mod parent up.
This is, in fact, the whole purpose of open-sourcing something. It makes it so that somebody who has a better idea can implement it. If that idea is incompatible with the original project or not accepted by the project owners, the party with the better idea forks, and a new project is formed. If that project is legitimately better, it will be the one that gets monetary support.
I see nothing wrong here.
They're paying to have a project that doesn't work well enough (by your own admission) rewritten completely so that it -will- work. Sounds to me like they're trying to save it.
If you want to prove yourselves, take the time to fix the current one before they have had time to completely rewrite it... If you can't, there's your real problem.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy.
I still don't see the problem. What I read is:
Company gets paid to develop app that is the same as an existing open source app.
For f*cks sake, if people couldn't clone existing apps there'd be no open source movement.
It cuts both ways.
There's your problem. You just alienated all the developers.
No sig today...
That's not OpenSophie, but the (equally open) new Sophie. So you're supporting grandparent's point. They have some demo pages too, whereas the OpenSophie website leaves us completely in the dark about what we can expect from the product. And where is that ajaxy web viewer it announces? Why not host a demo of that at least? This is the opposite of vaporware: "Here's a program I wrote. I'm not telling you what it does. Just install it and let it surprise you." If that approach ever worked, it was decades ago.
Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy.
But from what I can gather from the summary, the whole point of the grant was
to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java.
So in theory it's primarily a language swap, and the features and GUI shouldn't change much. Basically, I think the screenshotting is actually valid in this case, and honestly should be the guide for the new work.
open source modern art: laser taggi
Wow. Did you even bother to read the page you linked to? Or perhaps you failed to read the post you responded to.
The GPP already saw the docs download page. He was complaining that the opensophie.org web site only had documentation in zips, and that it lacked a description and screenshots. It is a legitimate complaint. Not only did you link to the wrong website, but both websites have the same problems. The GPP did not mention that the zip files at opensophie.org require that you use sophie to read them. So you have to download about 50 MB and use a special program before you can even read the intro.
I went to the sophie websites to learn what language the original was written in, out of curiosity. But that info is not available on their website, and I was not willing to download that large file just to find out.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Maybe you could skip the condecension ust tell us WTF is Sophie?
I followed your link. (which goes, aparently, to the new version, not the OpenSophie fork of the old the other poster asked about) It didn't reveal to me what Sophie is. I downloaded the pdf user manual from that page, noted the lack of any introduction, skimmed a couple of sections describing how to use various features... Still no idea what the app does. I followed every link in the Summary, none of which actually go to articles, so your RTFA advice is bollocks. The closest any of these came to telling me what sophie is was the single sentence "Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment." Which is more than I had previously, but not really all that much... is it a web browser? No. Some kind of wiki-like system? Doesn't seem like it. I think maybe I don't care what it is. Nor why someone thinks funding some Bulgarians to do something similar has some sort of magical negative effect on the original project.
I think the summary said they were rewriting it in Java, which is bad enough. I don't know what it was written in, but if rewriting it in Java can be passed as an improvement, I am afraid to find out.
Maybe the original developers don't like Java. I certainly don't.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Because 90% of developers understand Java, and maybe 10% understand SmallTalk. TIOBE lists SmallTalk as #36 in popularity with 0.123% market share and Java as #1 with over 20%.
Granted, TIOBE is based on search engine results, which aren't a perfect indicator of usage, but they are probably accurate to the order of magnitude.
Thank you for taking the time to post a response, Ms. Daley. In a world overwhelmed with partial information and people so excited about taking a single fact out of context and blowing it out of proportion, it is wonderful to see a clear explanation of a situation. Thank you for the breath of fresh air.
Best Wishes,
AC
{
public void speak()
{System.out.println("Hello World");}
public static void main()
{
HelloWorld helloWorld = new HelloWorld();
helloWorld.speak();
}
}
Haven't bothered to compile that, but it's close enough for 4:30AM. If I wanted to be a pain I'm sure I could shave off a line or two. Anyways, what is your beef with Java? I've found most people that diss on Java fall in to one of the following categories:
For my own part, I program in C/C++, Java, perl, a bit of .NET, V(B/C)-6, and ADA is my guilty pleasure language (arguably the most well designed and implemented of the bunch, IMHO). If memory footprint and load time aren't an issue and I need to go cross platform, Java is just my only option. In the languages that I know, Java is second only to ADA when it comes to concurrency (I admit I've never done anything with multithreading in .NET, but I'm sure it's fairly close to Java in both design and implementation). So, what's your beef with Java?
.NET/Ruby developer and are therefore sworn enemies to Java developers ;)
Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not judging you by the fact that you don't like Java. I also completely understand simply not liking a language; I've just found that many times when someone starts talking about why they don't like Java, they don't really have a reason other than it's 'cool' to diss on Java. Or they're a
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.