Open Source: you're doing it wrong - the Pyjamas hijack

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> A.k.a. "we had to destroy the project in order to save it".
>
> http://technogems.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/pyjamas-hijacked.html

Great summary, very handily peppered with links to appropriate posts.

> Seriously, this was a remarkably ham-fisted and foolish way to "resolve"
> a dispute over the direction of an open source project. That's the sort
> of thing that gives open source a bad reputation.

I'd probably be on the side of the dissidents in terms of philosophy -
freedom is there to be used, but if it costs you too much (effort,
quality, etc) to use all-free-software, the cart's involved in equine
artistry. You want a wiki? Throw down MySQL and MediaWiki. Want
hosting? GitHub is fine. I don't restrict my hardware purchases to
"free BIOS or no sale".

But a backstabbing takeover is not doing anyone any good. Especially
not the reputation of the project. Here at work we have some
familiarity with Python, and my boss is just starting to learn
Javascript (after our main JS developer left); but there's no way that
I'm going to consider introducing pyjamas / pyjs until this is
resolved.

> (The sad thing is, when closed source software developers do this sort of
> thing, it gets blamed on "bad apples"; when open source developers do it,
> it gets used as an indictment on the entire FOSS community.)

It's not quite as mixed-standards as that. If you see Microsoft or
Apple charging a fortune for trivial upgrades and/or bug fixes, you
blame it on corporate development. And some low-quality software in
the FOSS market is acknowledged as "you get what you pay for",
although that one can backfire too. But yes, it's a harsh reality that
one open-source community's actions reflect badly on another. (Which
is why I want to be really REALLY careful of using the term "open
source" here at work. Just because we let people have the source code
to certain scripts etc does not mean we should use that term. Just
sayin'.)

I hope that pyjamas can be restored at some point to a single live
project. Whether that's headed by Luke Leighton or C Anthony Risinger
(neither of whom I know at all and thus I can't speak to either's
merits) or someone else, I don't particularly care, but frankly, I
don't think there's need in the world for a fork of such a project.
Aside from philosophical disagreements, what would be the differences
between the Luke fork and the Anthony fork? Could anyone explain, to a
prospective user, why s/he should pick one or the other? If not, the
projects need to merge, or else one will die a sad death of
stagnation.

ChrisA