What a stupid thing!

[seamusdemora]

I'm a Debian user, which means I am slow on the uptake. I just read about the "pissing contest" between the authors of dtach and abduco.

It seems the "net effect" of this pissing is that neither package is being maintained any longer.

That sounds to me like "great stewardship" (said w/ heavy sarcasm) of the open source movement. Crigler blasts and complains about "infringement", wins the argument with the Debian maintainers apparently, and then proceeds directly to bit rot/no maintenance of his code... can someone explain the thinking behind this?

[xPMo]

First I'm hearing about abduco. From my reading, I can't find a response from the author of abduco until well after the email thread (martanne/abduco#27), and the author actually addresses the technical concerns with a technical response. The disagreement doesn't seem to be personal at all, purely technical. Not a "pissing contest".

That sounds to me like "great stewardship" (said w/ heavy sarcasm) of the open source movement.

It seems exceedingly minor, doesn't it? And it is very minor! But it's important to keep the terms of licenses. Otherwise they lose their power in court when it matters more. Especially if a project at the scale of Debian is including infringing software. We keep our standards high so that we can hold companies who would profit off of open source to those same standards.

Is it also kind of stupid? Yes.

fwiw, I have a dtach fork on my GH which includes some of the longstanding PRs to this repo.

[seamusdemora]

It seems exceedingly minor, doesn't it?

I'm not sure what you mean at all... I was ranting about the fact that the author of dtach:

1. made claims of "infringement" against the author of abduco
2. won the argument
3. then abandoned maintenance of dtach.

It would all make sense if the dtach author had continued to maintain this repo - at least for a while. But he didn't do that.

Just my 2 cents - you can take it, or you can leave it.