Re: [Xtrkcad-fork-developers] Current activities and a new name

[Martin F. <mar...@vr...>]

Welcome to this list!

On 16.03.2007 Bob Ham wrote:
> I can't seem to find any information on the fork anywhere on the web.
> I'd appreciate it if anyone could answer some questions:

Just a short piece of XTrkCad history:

XTrkCad originally was a piece of commercial software developed by Dave 
Bullis. It was marketed via (his?) company Sillub, that still can be
found under

http://www.sillub.com/

Early in 2005 Dave announced that he would open source XTrkCad and make 
it available to everybody. I know that binaries were available that 
didn't have the registration code. Around that time download from 
sillub.com stopped work.

Also a Sourceforge project xtrkcad was created by Dave. It still exists 
and the original source code can still be retrieved from there.

Somewhen by the end of 2005 a group of users decided to contribute to 
the improvement of XTrkCad. As Dave is the only administrator for the 
XTrkCad project and didn't respond to requests from volunteers to join 
the development team, we decided to create a new project and to work 
from the publically available sources from the XTrkCad CVS. At that time 
Jonathan was the project administrator. He did some work but then, for 
reasons beyond his control, had to focus on other things. He did 
'promote' me to a project administrator, so at least somebody was able 
to manage the Sourceforge project.

So technically we forged the project from the original XTrkCad version, 
As far as I know, nothing ever happened on the original XTrkCad project. 
Ever since we used the name XTrkCad for our project, which is not really 
correct. Dave put the source code under the GPL but he still owns the 
copyright for the original parts of the source and the name XTrkCad. 
That's we, as far as my limited knowledge of the law, we have to get 
permission to continue using the original name from Dave or have to find 
a new name.

Hope this clarifies the situation.

Regards
Martin