LWN: Comments on "Development quotes of the week"

Development quotes of the week

jani — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 14:44:34 +0000

I won't even attempt to summarize any of this, mainly because I couldn't be bothered to read it all, but looks like it's all here:

http://www.cpaptalk.com/viewtopic/t174687/SleepyHead-Proj...

Development quotes of the week

bkuhn — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 04:50:56 +0000

A quick look at the project's Gitlab's page hints pretty strongly that he faced a lot of GPL violations that were difficult for him to resolve (note the statements asking for proper credit). I wish I could have talked to him before it got bad, as I could probably have helped, but I didn't know about the project until I saw this quote. Plus, it seems like most of the problems were completely license-unrelated, so it's exaggerating to take the quote out of context like this. Most of the problems his blog post talks about are community-relationship issues that come in projects with any license.

Development quotes of the week

brooksmoses — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 02:13:07 +0000

Does anyone have more context on Mark Watkins's comment? What I'm getting from the post is a picture of a sadly burned-out lead developer who is letting go of a project because it has become a problem in their life rather than a source of happiness, and he blames it in part on "poor software licencing choices," but it's not clear to me whether he's blaming this on something particular about the GPL versus things like BSD, or whether he's using GPL as shorthand for free- and open-source licenses in general.

It's a sad story, in any case. Unfortunately, it's not limited to software (open or not); I've seen very similar abusive entitlement from readers against science fiction authors when the next book in a series is delayed.