Forking TangoGPS - a digest why this is a silly fork

[neomilium]

Hello,

First, as I'm not (fortunately, yes fortunately) a well-know guy as
you are, I must introduce myself: I'm a simple user, free/libre
software fan who haven't contribute to anything, who did nothing
relevant for OpenMoko FreeRunner or whatever. You can say anything
about my ignorance, you're right.

So, why would I reply to this mail, huh ? Because, I want to share my
enthusiasm to see a tangoGPS fork born... finally.

2010/4/14 Marcus Bauer <marcus.bauer at gmail.com>:
> I certainly haven't had the intent to add another post to this but
> because the parent post is featured on fsdaily and people following
> that link there want a quick reply:
I think that was better for you without this mail.

>  * tangoGPS is committed to quality and excellent user expierence is the
>   key of the development focus
Quality ? I tried few times tangoGPS (at least 6 month ago) and once,
nothing happen on GUI while I'm touching GUI, so I had launch it from
console and I saw messages like "this should not happen", and I said
"Ok, ok ok... this SHOULD not happen...", my bad luck, of course.
Excellent user experience ? User experience is relative... so no more
on this point.

>  * tangoGPS is open to contributions
Huh? I'm reading (and hearing) since at least a year about your way to
handle code and patches... and I was supposing that was a rumour, but
now I can say that's quite old... for a rumour.

> everybody can grab the
> tarball, put it in a VCS of choice and send patches
Interesting approach, so you don't want someone fork tangoGPS, but you
are ok to leave tangoGPS to be manage outside the main stream... very
interesting. Is it a new way to make free/libre software ?

>  * tangoGPS is actively maintained and experimental features are a part
>   of innovation and ongoing development
oO ! Interesting again... Usually free/libre software haven't to do
all this marketing to be used... Did you tried to convince yourself ?

>  * the forkers have so far submitted *two* patches which were not
>   accepted because they were very low quality, introducing several
>   bugs and at least one crasher
Easy to say... but we can't say ourself : VCS and bugtracker is
missing... too bad.

>  * the forkers compare themselves to egcs ./. gcc, however that fork was
>   done by long-standing, active contributors that shared a major part
>   of the development work
I was thinking the forker were tried to develop how their hands were
(are?) opened to you... or It's maybe me (again), I probably
misunderstood something...

>  * open source projects are based on meristocracy,
You're right ! Yeah... that's maybe the reason of fork.

> The tangoGPS project has been a huge success, it runs now on over
> 40 distributions and on a large variety of platforms, from handheld
> devices like the Freerunner, the Nokia N810 and N900, the smartQ5 and
> smartQ7, as well as on netbooks, laptops and even the AS/390...
Oh! Amazing... As you are the only one developer... the "god" of
tangoGPS, do you maintain all that packages ? Or did you fight against
the maintainer when he/she put some distribution's patches ?

> The success has only been possible due to the cooperation with the Open
> Source ecosystem at large, and has been featured in articles on major
> websites like linux.com.
The first valuable argument... many people works in free/libre world,
I would like to send big thanks to all them these guys and women who
are silently contribute to this beautiful underground world...

> An estimate from the webserver logs shows a user base far beyond
> 100.000 and the friendservice has been used over a million times.
How many times you read your logs a day ? Do you congratulate you each
times or only when there are ten more ?

> The project is now in its fourth year of development and contributions
> are as always very welcome.
Its seems to not be the case as said before.

> A big thank you for all the support I have got from the community, the
> development of a fast, easy to use and user oriented app will continue :)
Many users want to have a VCS, a bugtracker, etc. but you refuse to do
it each time, so could you reasonably talk about user oriented app ?

I know that's a flaming mail... I want to apologize to all users who
don't care about these stupid stuff...

But, Marcus, please give more respect to guys who really want to do
something more free/libre (I don't talk about me but forkers, patch
submitters, etc) and stop to be publicly aggressive against people
that don't think same as you.

Finally, I hope the best for free/libre softwares included tangoGPS
and his fork(s).

My first and last 2 cents about this subject.

PS: Excuse my poor english language.