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OS X Notifier App Growl Goes Closed Source
First time accepted submitter para_droid writes "Version 1.3 of the popular open source notification system for Mac OS X, Growl has surprised its users by going closed-source and only available for purchase on the Mac App Store. Any users who provide links to bugfixes and source for the previous version 1.2 are being banned from the discussion group, and their messages deleted. Could it be time for the community to create an OpenGrowl fork?"
The linked post above about bugfixes and source ends "Hopefully the Growl 1.3 branch from the official Growl maintainers
will eventually become open source again and get straightened out so
that it works for most users, but if it doesn't, a fork of the project
will be able to provide a working Growl to Mac users."
That's a piss poor excuse. Just run an open git repository and you'll never be bothered with packaging and releasing code again. Also, if people have the source they can help fix the issues that seem to be slowing them down.
They can slap whatever license they want on it, and make whatever promises they want. The fact remains that if a binary is available, and corresponding sources are not, it is closed source. It might be open source again, maybe even soon, but it's not open source today.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Hi, I'm the Project Lead for Growl. I'll be happy to respond to any questions replied to this thread, as long as they are kept nice, courteous, professional, etc.
So a few items I already know are going to be brought up.
1) We've had a large amount of inbound support requests in the last 2 weeks, more than we get in a 6 month period of time usually. http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/about?hl=en_US shows the statistics about just this month alone. Bear in mind this month is not done yet, this is not our only list/group/whatever google wants to call those things. We're also fielding support requests on twitter, and a direct email address (due to popular demand).
2) Source code was planned to be pushed over the wall this weekend. Since this post is up, we're changing our plans and going to work on getting the source up today. We've tried off and on over the last two weeks, but have ran into issues with multiple unclosed heads for instance in the repo, things like that. More technical issues, less issues with regards to actually posting source because we don't want to (we do, just i.e. there are just problems). We have a deadline to meet in order to get the source posted, but we also have people who need 1.3.1 since there are problems in 1.3 (just like in every other software product ever, in every version ever)
3) This guy was banned for only a month because he was responding in a very hostile way. He was told he would be unbanned at that point. However, he seems just like an angry individual in general, and I hope he gets counseling or something in order to help with anger management issues. He was not banned because he forked Growl, I think that's kind of neat actually and the point of being open source. He was being a poisonous person, and was removed as such. I will not discuss this any further, but wanted to address this here.
4) We will be providing source in the form of our chosen vcs. If you do not know how to use a vcs but you work with oss, or want to work with oss, not learning a vcs is doing yourself a disservice. Future employers, or current oss projects, will find your knowing a vcs up front an asset, and we want to promote that. Tarball distributions will be ended as of 1.3.
Chris Forsythe
Growl Project Lead