Forking TangoGPS - a digest why this is a silly fork

[Marcus Bauer]

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:

 * tangoGPS is committed to quality and excellent user expierence is the
   key of the development focus

 * tangoGPS is open to contributions, everybody can grab the
   tarball, put it in a VCS of choice and send patches

 * tangoGPS is actively maintained and experimental features are a part
   of innovation and ongoing development


 * 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

 * 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

 * open source projects are based on meristocracy, the longer and the
   more a developer or user contributes, the more influence he gains.
   Its a very simple and powerful concept.


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...

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.

An estimate from the webserver logs shows a user base far beyond
100.000 and the friendservice has been used over a million times.

The project is now in its fourth year of development and contributions
are as always very welcome.

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 :)



      Marcus Bauer
- Lead developer of tangoGPS -