Re: [LAD] Impro-Visor created on sourceforge

From: Raymond Martin <laseray@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Sat Aug 08 2009 - 21:58:14 EEST

On Saturday 08 August 2009 14:35:13 you wrote:
> On 08/09/2009 04:39 AM, Raymond Martin wrote:
> > On Saturday 08 August 2009 14:25:37 you wrote:
> >> On 08/09/2009 04:27 AM, Raymond Martin wrote:
> >>> On Saturday 08 August 2009 14:06:52 you wrote:
> >>>> On 08/09/2009 03:36 AM, Raymond Martin wrote:
> >>>>> Yes this would apply for the commercial product against any others
> >>>>> that are sold. It won't apply against free software because nothing
> >>>>> is sold.
> >>>>
> >>>> Does it really matter? Do you really need to keep the name? If your
> >>>> fork of the project continues active development while the institute
> >>>> continues to develop their version then there will definitely be
> >>>> confused users at some point down the line.
> >>>
> >>> There is no fork. I am wondering how many times do I have to write
> >>> that.
> >>
> >> I think you may have confused the issue by stating at the very start of
> >> this set of thread that you were going to fork the project and that you
> >> had reverse engineered the binaries.
> >
> > I would have to look back to see if I actually wrote "fork the project"
> > or if I wrote fork Impro-Visor. In any case, it is the application that
> > is important, not the idea of a project.
>
> What is the difference?

A computer program to which the license applies! The license does
not and cannot be applied to a "project". A project can be many things
in many different ways. Source code is only one thing and the binary
produced another thing directly related to the first.

>
> >>> There is no fork, it does not exist. There is only a project with
> >>> a similar name, and packages of the original version, no forked
> >>> program, no forked code, nada. Except I did make a couple of minor
> >>> changes in the Impro-Visor packages I put up. Those were just to make
> >>> it better for others so they would not end up violating the GPL.
> >>
> >> Sorry but how exactly is this different from a fork? Is there a guide
> >> that you have read somewhere that explains the exact steps required for
> >> making a fork? Why have you now decided that you are not actually
> >> forking the project when you originally declared that was the intended
> >> result of your efforts?
> >
> > A fork of an application is an application. What else could it be?
> >
> > All I am saying, very clearly I might add, is that there is no
> > application that could be considered a fork and that is what all the
> > discussions are about.
>
> So you have distributed a binary and the code that goes with as well as
> making (minor) changes to the code including attributing copyright to
> the various original authors in a way that wasn't done with the version
> of the application that you reverse engineered and that is not a fork?

Wrong. The original code was distributed by the Impro-Visor project
for any and all version on my SF project. Go check their SF project
and see. Jumping to conclusions a little bit there, aren't you?

The only changes I made were to add a readme file with some
more instructions, that make more sense than the original. And
alter the Ant build file so output is more sensible and does not
cause other potential problems. That can hardly be considered a fork,
none of the source code was touched. At most it might be considered
packaging or a patch.

>
> What is a fork if not all the above?

A fork is altered source code and other changes that really affect the
programs operation or changes to application name or related that
show it actually is a different version from the original.

All Linux applications that are packaged as RPM, deb and so forth
would be forks if minor things were seen as constituting a fork.
Each would be violating trademarks to some people then. Are they?

Raymond

_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-dev mailing list
Linux-audio-dev@email-addr-hidden
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
Received on Sun Aug 9 00:15:04 2009

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sun Aug 09 2009 - 00:15:04 EEST