[Sugar-devel] Discrepancy regarding an Activity

[Mohit Taneja]

Hi Daniel,

In my opinion, any contribution to an open-source project is most welcomed.
And yeah helping with the translaions into different languages is a
contribution that is much required to the FoodForce2 activity. I will
definitely appreciate such a contribution.

But still there is a difference between contribution and a fork. To have a
fork one needs to have some major prior contribution to the project. Adding
translations and changing the copyrights, and forget the credits of the
people who have been working on a particular project for around 2 years, is
probably, atleast in my opinion, ethically wrong.

Regards,
Mohit Taneja


On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:

> 2009/11/15 Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org>:
> > 2009/11/15 Mohit Taneja <mohitgenii at gmail.com>:
> >> Well it seems to be an unmaintained fake release of the original
> FoodForce2
> >> game. I guess only the copyrights have been changed. In fact, I went
> through
> >> the their homepage and saw that this organization is into doing such
> things
> >> only, they copy source code of open source activities, do minor tweaks
> and
> >> then upload it by their own credits.
> >
> > Well they have certainly contributed some new activities to Sugar
> > which I assume are their own, but this is indeed a bit odd. Is this
> > really the first you've heard of this fork?
>
> And to confuse matters more.. surely you knew of Manusheel's
> involvement (or at least his interest) in your project well before the
> supposed fork date of June 23 -- I have a personal email in my inbox
> from May where Manusheel was persuading deployments to try out the new
> activity and provide feedback (I was in Paraguay at the time). He
> writes it as if you are all a team, seeta included, and suggests that
> it was even listed as a project on the SEETA website at that time. And
> see his name on
> http://blog.laptop.org/2009/05/08/food-force-2-makes-waves/
>
> Anyway, it seems like the easiest thing to do here would be to give
> commit access to Manusheel's team to the original repository. It looks
> like they have just made the first change in their forked version,
> adding a spanish translation, and I imagine that's not a contribution
> you would turn down.
>
> Manusheel, in the open source world, when forking a project the common
> etiquette is to rename it to something substantially different.  But
> in this case I suggest you simply dissolve the fork and attempt to
> work together, in the same place. Less work for everyone.
>
> Daniel
>
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