Some words about the recent history

[SammysHP]

As you mentioned me in the README, I want to add some notes from what I remember happening in the last few months and my work related to it and the consequences:

1. Since last year I'm the maintainer of the Arch Linux free42 AUR package.

2. The first thing I noticed is the lack of a proper repository. Tarball releases are not appropriate anymore for open source projects. Thus I emailed Thomas a few months ago and asked if he might want to push the repository to GitHub. He did it and committed to his private SVN and Git, but reluctant. He said something about that "he did everything himself and never got any other contributions, so there is no reason to make the repo public" (IMHO that is the result of a missing source repository – no easy source access, no contributions).

3. Also I suggested some features (screen always on depending on flag, multitouch for shift key and some more that I don't remember because they were only on the deleted mailing list and the deleted GitHub repository).

4. Some months later I suggested a feature to load skins from a system directory and submitted a patch for it. He rejected it with the reason that "no sysadmin is going to install Free42 in /usr/bin and make a set of skins available in a system-wide directory" – well, at least I did. And I argued that free42 is in the repositories of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and probably more distributions. That was the time when he deleted the GitHub repository. Some days later someone mentioned the GitHub repository on the mailing list and Thomas posted some rant-like comments about the events. I tried to explain it in a short summary with my intentions and stated that it is his decision and that I won't argue with him, but that it would be nice to respect other developers. A few weeks later the mailing list was deleted, including a lot of helpful explanations and comments.

5. Because I feared that the history of free42 will never be public anymore, I extracted all release tarballs that I had on my computer and created a repository containing the free42-nologo releases. I'd like to provide the full source code for all platforms, but these were not available for me. I also have a fork of the repository that contains the few commits he made on GitHub.

6. Today I noticed, that some tools like the HP42S Code Editor or the txt2raw script are gone. I still have copies of them and can share them if you want (but there is no license included, so I won't post them publicly).

Summarized I'm a bit disappointed about Thomas' position and reaction. I think he is not used to open source development and that other people want to mess with his code. ;) I really appreciate his work because he gave us an excellent tool that is even platform independent! But at the same time I'd like to have a more open project so that the community can make it even better.

Maybe Thomas reads this and can write a few words about why he deleted the repository and the mailing list. Currently there's just the hpforum if you need help with free42 and all of the helpful resources from the mailing list are gone.

[axd1967]

Hello @SammysHP - totally agree with you.

Even if nobody would contribute, pushing to a more recent repository would have a big value. But I suspect that TO is used to SVN, so I can understand that it is not easy to switch to Git (especially because he seems to be allergic to Git).

To be noted that the code itself relies on the VCS, this certainly needs to be simplified.

Deleting any type of history is almost criminal... I was initially verbally abused by someone related to TO when I suggested to move away from tarballs, and my message was simply deleted from the (now gone, or inactive) mailing list. (BTW - I also read your 'DRAFT: Gtk: Add system-wide skin directory (#3)')

I'll draw the attention of the author of the Code Editor to this issue, because until now he was not very keen on sharing code (I suspect he is ashamed of messy code, or maybe because he lost part of it or can't compile it any more, can't think of anything else).

[SammysHP]

1. Git, SVN, HG – doesn't matter! I'll work with what is available. Git is the easiest one for hosting and contributing, of course (because of the great, free infrastructure). ;)

2. So you've followed the discussion on my pull request where I said something like "OK, you don't want free42 to be included in distribution's repositories?" – I hope that this wasn't unfriendly or offensive. I just wanted to point out that there's more than just his website.

3. Yes, deleting the mailing list was a really bad decision. Thomas might be busy with the DM42 firmware, but nobody pushed him to do anything. And again I hope that my feature requests were not understood wrong.

4. To the author of the Code Editor: No reason to be shy! Coding is not something you can do wrong. There might be better ways to do something, but as long as it works (or even if it does not work) code is a form of energy that shouldn't be wasted. So if you're able (copyright restrictions etc.) to release the code, please do it!

[axd1967]

related issues:

• https://forum.swissmicros.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=121
• https://forum.swissmicros.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14

[axd1967]

It appears that there are very dictatorial members floating around the Free42 project, because my post on the Code Editor was removed by one of them.

Again, removing a piece of code because one's own implementation is better (copy-paste from clipboard, as specified here) is no justification to remove such code.

I suspect that linking to this issue is proving to be too problematic...