Re: [eGroupWare-core] Thoughts from a long walk home

[Oscar v. E. <osc...@ov...>]

Longs walks are great :)

I agree with everything you say, except the first alinea; it's not that
Lars and Conny don't work on the 1.x codeline at all. They didn't stop
providing support, but their innovative focus shifted a bit.

As I see it, the main reason people have been reacting angry (including
Lutz, who is definitely trying to use a different tone, so I didn't
agree with you flaming earlier today), is pure frustration, for
different reasons, and that's what makes the situation complex.

It's okay to get frustrated every once in while, we all do this for fun,
and as long as everybody is able to say 'sorry' now and then (not for an
opinion, but for an impulsive reply), it all would be a lot easier.

Sorry to bother you with my thoughts ;)
Oscar

On Mon, 2008-02-11 at 20:50 +0100, Carsten Wolff wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> what I get from the postings here is, that people are angry with Lars, because 
> he effectively stopped working on eGW 1.x, after being one of the big forces 
> behind the eGW development, which leaves some important code unmaintained. 
> Most of the other criticisms seem to be rooted somewhere near that fact.
> 
> I can understand those feelings from an emotional point of view, but not 
> really from the concepts of the GPL.
> 
> The agreement between the members of a FOSS project is basicly supplied by the 
> license of the code. The widely used license that eGW uses only guarantees, 
> that the receiver of a changed eGW has the right to receive the sourcecode as 
> well. This does not bind developers in any way as far as the nature of the 
> changes is concerned.
> 
> I see this in other projects every day. Developers sometimes vanish for a 
> thousand different reasons, or they shift their focus because of another 
> thousand reasons. This is normal. Basically a user or co-developer has no 
> right to demand anything else from any developer of GPL software than the 
> sourcecode of changed versions of the program. And not having the right to 
> demand something also means, you don't have the right to be angry at someone 
> who does not meet your demands. Of course it might create a problem for you 
> that you're stuck with unmaintained code, but that's just it. This can happen 
> and that's clear from the start.
> 
> This leads me to the conclusion, the only question regarding the current 
> situation in eGW is this: Will benefits come for both sides from developing 
> Tine within egroupware.org, or not?
> 
> [My personal answer: Absolutely. Compatibility between the two is an important 
> advantage for both and will not happen, if the devs don't use the same tools 
> and communication channels. Also, nobody who ever debugged eGW can deny that 
> it's suffering from its' legacy. So in the best case, if Tine really manages 
> to be a completely compatible rewrite of eGW written with clean coding 
> concepts, it would be like a lottery win. And in the worst case, if Tine will 
> be a failure, eGW lost manpower for half a year or so.]
> 
> Basically my advice is to find back to cooperation to the extend, which is 
> technically possible. For the supporters of eGW 1.x, this means to accept the 
> fact, that maybe there will come a time when much of their code will be 
> replaced. For the Tine people this means to accept working on the same 
> platform as a person, they don't like personally (but this really should be 
> possible, that's the case in any environment with many people in it).
> 
> Carsten