Re: [xmlwrapp-users] Good News

[Václav S. <vs...@gm...>]

Hi,

On 18 Mar 2012, at 20:02, Browder Jr, Thomas M wrote:
> Glad to see the original xmlwrapp project back up and running.
> 
> -Tom

May I ask why felt the need to do this? And what are your plans with xmlwrapp now?

"This" above refers, of course, to what you silently did two days ago with sf.net/projects/xmlwrapp, still xmlwrapp's home: removing me (the maintainer of xmlwrapp for the last 3.3 years) not only from the admins list, but completely from the project — along with, apparently, everybody else [1]. And changing the description to say that the official xmlwrapp source repository, https://github.com/vslavik/xmlwrapp, is just "a fork".

I'm really baffled by this, to be honest.

For the benefit of the public record, here's a brief summary of xmlwrapp's recent history: 

Back in 2008, xmlwrapp stagnated: no new commits were made (the last ones were from 2005 [2]), patches were rotting in the tracker unapplied and without any acknowledgment. Relying on such a library didn't look safe, so I, together with Vadim Zeitlin, approached Peter Jones, the original author, Eric Beyeler and Tom Browder (then-admins of sf.net/projects/xmlwrapp) with the proposal that we'll take over maintainership of the project to keep it alive. The driving motivation was that we wanted to avoid a fork, be it private or public, because forks are bad (I'm an old school Open Source guy that way).

The response was unconditionally positive (Eric: "If you want to, it's all yours. I simply haven't had time to do anything with it"; Tom Browder: "Concur--please feel free to take it over." and "Vaclav, you have the whole ball of wax!  Thanks, and good luck." a bit later; even Peter stepped in to thank everybody for keeping xmlwrapp alive). And so I did.

Over the three+ years and 100+ changesets since then, I did much more than what I needed personally: from the general cleanup and modernization, to fixing various problems, making several releases, improving performance and adding new APIs. I honestly don't think I neglected anything in maintaining the library and I more than earned my place in xmlwrapp history. Seeing all that dismissed as just some fork offends me deeply.  

Tom, what makes this even more puzzling is that you didn't show much interest in xmlwrapp in that 3+ years. You mentioned Debian packages in late 2010, to which I offered passive support, but that wasn't exactly a contribution: not only is distro-packaging an affair external to the library itself, it apparently didn't work out, as packages.debian.org still doesn't list xmlwrapp. Then you complained about the move to github in September 2011 (https://groups.google.com/d/topic/xmlwrapp/8JPNmQ4vUfI/discussion), despite being off active xmlwrapp development for 5 years. But you seemed to accept the explanation [3] and didn't pursue it further.

So why do you now, out of the blue, fork off xmlwrapp, take advantage of the official home (it's kind of hard to be the maintainer when I don't control the home and can't even upload release tarballs...) and do all that under the radar? Instead of working in the normal Open Source way of cooperating on shared codebase?

Thanks,
Vaclav


[1] I can no longer view the members list, but I can see that Peter the founder and Eric, both of them admins of the projects, no longer have xmlwrapp on their respective SF user pages.

[2] Specifically the two months period in Sep-Nov when Tom Browder committed into the SVN repository; the last commit from pre-Tom era was another 1.5 years older.

[3] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/xmlwrapp/aoFZ7FKGWPk/discussion -- and really, meritocracy in Open Source is sacred to me, I would never do anything substantial without discussion among _active developers_.