Forks, free software, accusations and tempers.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

I wonder at what point will the number of wrenches people have thrown into our operation will actually be enough to stop us..

Maybe we can start collecting and selling them off. Nah, they would just throw em back in the works.

[JustOff]

It's funny how my ill wishers constantly attribute to me the intentions that they themselves are inventing, and then condemn. I never distanced myself from the project and the community, unless of course you consider that you are a project and community in one person. This is you deprived me of the opportunity to change my extensions into external, which I asked from the very beginning. And now you say that you are disappointed, and about the spirit of free software? Well, if you want to win at the expense of power, and not of the truth, I have nothing to oppose this. I'm not going to develop this discussion and annoy you further. All I wanted to say about this, I already said in the previous comment, now let everyone judge for themselves.

[Cassette]

JustOff's point isn't without merit. Taking a piece of software and changing nothing but the name and branding seems unethical to me even if it's completely legal. If you are going to maintain the software outside of the work done by the software you've forked from, fine, but if you're only copying the commits by it, what are you actually providing?

[vannilla]

what are you actually providing?

I'd provide a different management, which in itself is more than enough to warrant a fork-with-different-name-only.
If you look at the history of sofware you'd see that many forks, if not all of them, including the very first fork ever made which was recognized as a fork, were born out of people disagreeing with how maintainers managed the development of some software, instead of some other reason.
Granted, many of them either stopped existing or became a different thing altogether, but they were still born out of disagreement at the personal level, not something else.
What is happening that JustOff is disagreeing with, is exactly this: someone is not happy with how JustOff is handling this, thus they made a fork, changing management.

[Nightbird]

That isn't exactly true. CAA and Ublock are still listed as externals.

Until when ?
CAA was on the blocklist (severity 3) then removed from it (maybe because of this topic viewtopic.php?f=46&p=212376)

[Nightbird]

Off-topic:
That article is extremely misguided and completely misses the point of open/free-as-in-freedom licenses.
In fact, the article is so terrible I ask people to not read it at all.

Thanks Vanilla.
I will read it and I will make my own opinion.

[Nightbird]

If you're not interested in actually supporting free and open source software projects, but rather attempting to gain control of them, then we don't need your extensions frankly. Stop scaring off other actual contributors with your babble. You've already shown here on the forums you don't respect proper security measures or users choices, or the infrastructure choices of the maintainers of this project: viewtopic.php?f=46&t=26204&p=209112#p209112

Who are "we" ?

[athenian200]

I have a small warning for those who may want to publish copies of my extensions, which differ from the originals only by changed branding, given that after migration from APMO to GitHub, I was deprived of the opportunity to list my extensions as external.

Well, that's kind of the issue. They're not really your extensions, and at least some of your extensions are maintenance forks of discontinued extensions written by other people anyway. If you wanted them to be yours, then you should have started from scratch and put in a copyright notice and "All Rights Reserved," or something. Because you didn't, they're not yours. It's that simple.

Although it formally does not violate the license, the one who releases the fork of a live project, without making any real contribution, still acts like a petty thief. So think twice, whether you want such fame.

I do get what you're trying to say here, and in some circumstances I would even agree with the spirit of it. I've definitely seen forks of open source projects that I think are pointless and only intended to create drama.

But the fact is that these forks that were made of "your" extensions are based on legitimate differences of opinion on the future of each project and who should be in charge of that development, even if no major contributions have been made yet. That is not an uncommon practice. You have to build a fork up before the contributors will come. That's the thing about open source software. Forking over petty disagreements is kind of what that whole scene has always been about, and it's a reason why a lot of people and companies still prefer proprietary licensing and see it as more professional. Honestly, open source isn't even my preference, I've just found myself contributing to an open source project because I see it as my best remaining option.

Open source is always going to involve that kind of edgy, rebellious, hacker mentality where people get angry and fork entire projects for weird reasons. If you see it as theft, then I totally get that... but I also think you have to understand that most people in the open source community won't see it that way, and that if you want your work and your contributions to be respected, then you need licensing that reflects that. Many people these days have almost no moral qualms about literal software piracy, how much less do you think they care about how a contributor to an open source project feels about people forking "their" projects without what they see as sufficient justification?

This article is not directly related, but also worth reading: Forking Protocol: Why, When, and How to Fork an Open Source Project.

This article seems like it's more about talking about why forks often don't succeed or are a wasted effort, and what you can do to make sure your fork is seen as justified by the community. It doesn't seem to be condemning people for making forks at all, just implying they risk their time and energy if they don't follow a certain procedure. It doesn't really seem to be talking about forking as theft at all, at least not to my eyes.

[Cassette]

If you look at the history of sofware you'd see that many forks, if not all of them, including the very first fork ever made which was recognized as a fork, were born out of people disagreeing with how maintainers managed the development of some software, instead of some other reason

But were those forks only changes in name or in actual functionality? If these forks of JustOff's forks have their own work done by the new maintainer, I have no issue with it. If not, it's just copying his upstream work and slapping a new label on it. Doesn't seem right to me if that is the case.

[vannilla]

Doesn't seem right to me if that is the case.

Why not? Becoming the new owner, regardless of what work you do, has deeper implications than you think.
Lame example: bug reports don't go to JustOff, unless the new owner forwards them to him.

Anyway, having an open/free license means that you allow people also do mindless forks, regardless if you think of it as theft.
And that's perfectly reasonable, because free/open licenses are meant to protect a user's rights, which also include the ability to make any modification to a certain piece of software. If those changes are only in the name, icon and the bug report address, so be it.

They're not really your extensions

Actually, they are, at least in part.
Of course neither the license nor the copyright can be changed willy-nilly, but at the same time it can't be said that a fork isn't owned at all by the new maintainer.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

JustOff, let me say one thing that tears your argument to shreads regarding your extensions.

You do not get the privilege of having all your extensions listed as externals because of your extremely irresponsible and very public conduct surrounding your decision to not have them hosted on the Add-ons Site.

You took it upon your self to not to just transition off and make amacable arrangements but to pull a public ragequit and cut and run strategy (that mostly failed because I anticipated it) and you got caught red handed abusing your trusted status to highjack people's browsers to download code from an unknown source without any kind of consent, notification, or security verification of integrity. The moment you did that all good faith went out the window.

Indeed, you had to be forced and guilted into doing as close to the right thing as possible under the circumstances by us and you only did so to maintain some loose interpretation of credibility on your part. Something we allowed you to maintain. If it were ANYONE else you would have been banned completely without a second thought for what you did. Even now you were permitted to stay here on the forums for the good of all and what have you done with that privilege?

You come back after saying nothing since then only to attack the effort and discourage people stepping up to create forks of extensions mere days before the release of the next major version of Pale Moon which does not have the dual-guid hack that permitted long unmaintained Firefox extensions to be installed.

At this point any reasonable community member not hopelessly enamored by you AS WELL AS the entirety of the community core can see you for who and what you are.

We have suffered the likes of you long enough. In the name of truth, justice, reality, and history I call for the immediate removal of JustOff from our company.

[Moonchild]

**mid-aired this post with Tobin's but I'm posting it anyway even if it covers pretty much the same ground**

I'm not going to develop this discussion and annoy you further.

Of course not, because you're now just trying to make this somehow about "invented intentions". Unlike you, however, I don't have the tendency of trying to rewrite history to fit my current narrative. Maybe that's the way you work and you assume everyone else does too, but news flash, most people don't.

Bottom line remains you're complaining about people forking open source and warning them about being labelled a thief if they dare to do so when they are "your" extensions, and that's just all sorts of not getting the point of Open Source. You do this only after being quiet for a long time after exiting and ceasing your participation (with us obliging to give all your users the least resistance to move to your GitHub sourced distribution) when it seems like yes, people are indeed moving and doing the work to fill the gaps. For the record, my involvement and influence in this process of motivating people to fork extensions was minimal.

I understand that you might not be happy that users would be moving away from your extensions/forks to versions maintained by others, but that is their choice.

I never distanced myself from the project and the community

Yes, you did. Maybe you want to argue that you didn't do so through your own direct actions, but indirectly you most certainly did.

This is you deprived me of the opportunity to change my extensions into external

So this is your focal point now, eh?
Actually, let me remind you and everyone else here that the reason is that you yourself burned that bridge by providing a "migration" that flaunted the very security and trust principles the add-ons site's staff code inspection is there to ensure. It was not "deprivation of opportunity" (pretty speech terminology there), but rather the protection of users from unsafe practices in extensions.
"External" extensions are not and have never been an excuse or way around getting away with unsafe practices; in fact, externals to the best of my knowledge have always been reserved for authors who have the add-on team's trust in that they are responsible for safe and acceptable coding that follows normal security practices (in particular: authors who themselves wanted to keep tighter control over their distribution from a safety or business point of view, and did not want to submit their extensions to APMO in the first place). External status is a privilege, not a right. It's certainly never meant to be about "withdrawing extensions from the site" while still continuing to use the site infra's benefits while not subjecting to the responsibilities that come with extension development, publication and maintenance.
So, after that, it isn't all that strange that the add-ons site staff decided not to extend that privilege to you (since there was no necessary basis of trust any more that the externals would be safe) and insisting on vetting the migration procedure so it could be performed in a safe way and with user choice, since it was clearly necessary. It was the only proper way we could do this and have distribution be entirely in your hands (which is what you wanted), meaning not as an external.

[jobbautista9]

Taking a piece of software and changing nothing but the name and branding seems unethical to me even if it's completely legal.

I think it's more unethical for a person to disallow anyone to redistribute software verbatim. The very opposite of user's computing freedom.

Now if that software has been proprietary from the start, I will not complain about it. It's their right, though I still view it personally as unethical. I will just find a free replacement for that particular software. Easy.

But we're talking about software that has been free (as in freedom) from the start. Once you released a software under a free software license, it's free for a lifetime. You can't bitch about it, because otherwise, you should've used a proprietary license instead. You can't call someone a thief for simply exercising the right you've given to them.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Absolutely correct. What people don't have a right to unless explicitly granted is the name and any other logo and branding or false association by deceptive attribution.

So really seems like loosely inverting standard thinking. Well, by the looks of it seems like a user has had their membership on the forum inverted as well.

Thus concludes another derailed thread.

[Cassette]

I think it's more unethical for a person to disallow anyone to redistribute software verbatim.

I don't care what's more or less ethical. That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

You can't call someone a thief for simply exercising the right you've given to them.

The distinction I'm making is simply re-releasing software without changing anything about it apart from branding and calling it your own vs actually developing the software as your own. I have an ethical issue with the former and my mind won't be changed by citing a person's right to do it. You wouldn't feel alright with me insulting your mother even if I legally can do it.

[ron_1]

I have an ethical issue with the former and my mind won't be changed by citing a person's right to do it.

And you have no ethical issue with JustOff's extension transition causing "people's browsers to download code from an unknown source without any kind of consent, notification, or security verification of integrity" (quoted from Tobin)? That alone is enough reason to fork his stuff.

[Cassette]

And you have no ethical issue with JustOff's extension transition causing "people's browsers to download code from an unknown source without any kind of consent, notification, or security verification of integrity" (quoted from Tobin)? That alone is enough reason to fork his stuff.

I do have an issue with that, but it has no bearing whatsoever on the point I'm making. It's irrelevant.

[Moonchild]

simply re-releasing software without changing anything about it apart from branding and calling it your own vs actually developing the software as your own.

You don't seem to understand that every single fork starts that way. By its very definition, at the forking point it is a copy without changes. The changes and diversion come later.
When I forked Pale Moon, way back when, it was a verbatim copy of Firefox, just built differently.
Same for Waterfox (and that actually remained a rebranded copy for almost all its life). You have an ethical problem with that?

The difference is, as already pointed out by others, that when you fork, rebrand and make it your own, you do more than just changing the branding -- you take responsibility for it. You become the responsible person for the software. Responsible for developing it further, publishing it, updating it and maintaining it. The plus side is that you can do all those things as you see fit.
Denying someone that right (whether technically or morally or ethically) is denying the exact freedom that Free Software is all about!

[Admin]

This has been split off from the original thread as it had nothing to do with it any longer and the resulting discussion clearly was not in any way a support request.

[Cassette]

I've never denied that someone should be able to fork. I just think that it should be more than a clone with a different label. I've stated this already and it doesn't seem to be getting through so I'll leave it at that.