Carlsbad Cubes Wolf Paulus

opinion

Clone for fame or famous for cloning?
By Wolf Paulus <wolf@wolfpaulus.com>

Posted Thursday, January 06th, 2005

Now this is really ticking me off. For the 3rd or 4th time now some SOB comes along, clones a project's CVS hosted on java.net, changes a couple lines of codes and imports it into a "new" project on SourceForge.
One of those clones even bothered publishing a list of incompatibilities, which is certainly longer than the lines of code changed. Best of all, I received an e-mail with an "invitation to a healthy competition, which certainly would serve the users."

Maybe this is why I don't like SourceForge all that much, not only does the UI really suck, most of the projects hosted there are either deserted or a POS - admittedly, there are exceptions but the approval process one has to go through to get a project on java.net certainly works a lot better then what sf.net does.
Worst of all, all the cloneys mentioned above are follow German countrymen, desperately seeking fame but taking considerable shortcuts and haven't understood how open source project are suppose to work. It's certainly a lot harder to explain your feature requests and solution approaches to other developers on the team, than cloning and hacking away.

I don't know why I even bother reading the emails from those clones.




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Published on: Thursday, January 06th, 2005  •  Category: [opinion]

Article URL : http://wolfpaulus.com/journal/opinion/clones.html