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A Blog, rather a IREM

What if the Church was an opensource software project?

ChurchTEch had an interview with project leader of SSPX AB_Lefebvre

ChurchTEch: SSPX is a fork off of Roman Catholicism (RC), so what caused the fork?

AB_Lefebvre: We just were not comfortable with some of the interface changes being made. A lot of users were confused, and performance really suffered. But the big issue is licensing, the leaders of RC took a more permissive view of the licensing of  Salvation technology.We agree that Truth technology is licensed permissively, but we really do not believe that it is right that other projects are using elements of Salvation. While we both claim the license never changed, we can not agree.

CT: There is a lot of bad blood between the projects.

AB_Lefebvre: Unfortunately so. After the developers convention VaticanCon2 the admins started accepting lot patches into the stable branch of RC directly without testing them, and we are talking about major refactoring here. Between versions 1.01963 and 1.01970 thousands of lines of code were rewritten. We saw compatibility issues even between minor version numbers. Stability was horrible, and the interface was changing every day, and these changes were happening in the stable branch with no testing. I got asked by several developers and users to lead a group dedicated to preserving the old interface, so we were given a branch and space on the FTP server.
In the meantime tensions were heating up about the licensing issues. As I said, many of us thought there are issues with the way other projects were implementing Salvation, and kept arguing on the list serve that their implementations were not going to work. This reignited a older flame war. There had been a group led by Fr.FeenySJ who trolled the lists and IRC saying Salvation should be closed source. After getting flamed so much by the people on the list serve, even though I have a GNU tattoo I’m inclined to agree with the Feenyites.
So I was generally hated, but I had some new developers who I wanted to give write privileges to the CVS server. I asked nicely as was the procedure, and I was told they would be added soon, but they never were. So I added them myself, and next thing I know the whole branch, my account, their accounts are all gone. So we took our code and opened a fork, SSPX, on SourceForge.

CT:  So how are the goals of SSPX different from RC:

AB_Lefebvre: Well we have the older interface, but more importantly we stand for a stricter license on Salvation. For the most part we only issue maintaince releases. We are very careful with innovation. The code is complex, and it works now, adding things is going to break it. So I’d say were are dedicated to preserving the existing code base. Since VaticanCon2 RC has focused on cleaning up the codebase, simplifying the interface, and adding more network protocols, but we think this has resulted in a loss of functionality and stability. We have done a lot of documentation work, as well as some incremental work in the interface and the Education module. Occasionally we have to issue a compatibility patch to keep from falling to far from RC.

CT: Has there been progress towards a reconciliation.

AB_Lefebvre: We are paying close attention to what is going on upstream, we like some of the more recent patches and are seeing increased stability. We also submit any thing we can upstream, but most of it does not get into the codebase. I met with their leader Papa_Nostro16 on IRC a few months ago, and there was no flaming which is a start. I think they see we have some really talented developers and important users, and are interested in talking. I respect Papa_Nostro16, and we have made progress in the interface area, but the licensing issues are still very much there.

CT: AB_Lefebvre thank you for your time.

posted by: nictitator at 19:56 | link | comments (12) |

I am almost not Unique

Here is conclusive evidence of other Nick Winkers:
One in CT who can run faster than I can see line 71
And Another down south who seems to be musically inclined
And Another in the UK who is a Liberal!

Luckily none appear to be Nicklaus Winker all Nicholas Winker's so I am apprently, as far as Google knows unique.

posted by: nictitator at 00:44 | link | comments (2) |