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How To Kill an Open Source Project With New Funding

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the money-still-the-root-of-all-evil dept.

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?"

3 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Hang on a sec... by Chairboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. I don't understand by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
  3. Sounds fair to me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).