Recently, Linux.com posted an article called “When open source projects close the process, something’s wrong.” It starts out as a seemingly generalized complaint about open source projects not being so open, but after the first two sentences you realize that it’s just accusing two groups in particular.

The first case accuses the Oxygen Project, which is associated with KDE, of not being open because two of their developers complained in their blog about some guy publishing their icons before them. The second case is about the GIMP, which is sorta-kinda associated with Gnome, not being open because they apparently told somebody that they didn’t have any spots on the team available for them.

With the KDE team, I don’t actually see the issue. They did not demand that it be taken down. They simply pointed out that in a more decent world, they’d be the ones who would get to release first, and that it was kind of an asshole move to take away the first final publication privilege. No actual demand though. See, just because you can take advantage of something, doesn’t mean you aren’t being annoying if you do. The KDE team didn’t actually do anything but say that they thought it was annoying. There is no clause in the GPL or CC license that says they can’t post to their blog when people do annoying things, even if those annoying things happen to be license compliant.

As for the GIMP thing, we’d definitely need more information. No FOSS project that I’m aware of gives final commit abilities to anybody that asks, not even Kernel.org, which is the most famous. However, most of the better ones will still definitely allow people who give a contribution to be on the team, most likely with their own separate SVN or CVS branch or something until they earn commit access to the big thing (notice all the small fish on Kernel.org). So if the guy was flat out turned away and told that they didn’t have room for him as a contributor, then that’s no good. But if they merely didn’t give him commit access, or if he didn’t actually contribute anything but still wanted his own SVN or CVS or whatever branch, that’s also understandable. The article really should have told us exactly what the person offered those GIMP developers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Politics, Technology, Visual Flavor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.