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Re: Blocking Gmail ads



On 15/05/2008, Gregory Seidman <gsslist+debian@anthropohedron.net> wrote:

>  Looks like Apple did terrible harm by devoting resources to improving the
>  functionality and releasing them to the world, eh? Oh, but it isn't getting
>  back to KHTML quickly, you say? That sometimes happens in a code fork.

Well, the rules (LGPL) say that they have to give back the code. Which
they did, in large chunks, a year later, in ways that were impossible
to put back into KDE. They didn't break any written rules, just didn't
act in a way that is traditional in the free software community. They
acted like a corporation would (this is not a compliment, despite what
the "profitable == moral" people think).

Forking is generally seen as a hostile falling apart within our
community. Forking happens with big disagreements, negative publicity,
and internal flamewars. Xemacs vs Emacs, XFree86 vs Xorg, Funpidgin vs
Pidgin... And I don't see Apple's forking as a friendly move either.
And it's taken a long time for KDE to benefit from it, and in the
meantime the whole thing caused flamewars within KDE.

Fiasco, I insist.

- Jordi G. H.


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