Just a quick note on a small point I noticed.
The announcement that there is now a “line-by-line port of Sqlite to C#” is travelling around all the planets.
“Funny thing here”, the man says as he taps his chin and looks upward thoughtfully.
I had heard that porting something line-by-line was really a “ripoff”; that is was a “bad reason” if your code “was written purely to duplicate an existing program in a different implementation language.” But, I’m not hearing that about csharp-sqlite? I’m sure Team Mono and the Dilligent Defenders are simply proof-reading the condeming posts they have been slaving over. Fact-checking and whatnot.
Note that the licensing has changed to from Sqlite as well! Scandalous! I once read “you can’t change an app’s license” or that “You can’t change a source’s license without explicit permission to do so”. Oh my, that’s two for two! Well, at least I know I can count on everyone to roundly criticize this new “ripoff” with me! I mean you can’t just be abiding by the terms of a license, you have to abide by the terms of a license in a way that is approved by the community!
I mean, say for example, you got together with some proprietary software house and figured out some legal trickery to get around the intent of a popular Open Source license. A crazy scenario, sure, but if it did happen I know everyone would condem that; especially if they tried it when Gnote stay perfectly within the bounds of Tomboy’s licensing.
So, will we be seeing those apologies and corrections for the reaction to Gnote yet? How about a round of good old-fashioned personal attacks and assigning malicious motives for the author of csharp-sqlite? I’ll be right here holding my breath. Good thing I quit smoking, no?
#1 by Stefano F. (tacone) on August 7th, 2009
Sometimes I think Mono (core) developers should take distances from some of these guys.
AFAIK Tomboy’s Sandy and Hubert have always been polite to each other. But copyright and all kinds of attack have been done to Gnote. (see the ubuntuforums thread).
But, even so, all kind of attacks came (duplicating, copyright issues and so on).
That’s how open source works. You choose a permissive license, you accept consequences.
#2 by Jo Shields on August 7th, 2009
I wondered why somebody was asking me about CC-BY and DFSG. Now I know.
This project has been a licensing disaster from day 1 – this is actually the second time it’s released (it was pulled the first time for trademark-related problems). And CC licenses are a dreadful choice of license for software in general – not even touching upon the “fork with more restrictive license” issue which, whilst permitted, bugs me immensely. There’s also some debate as to whether CC-BY is considered a Free license under DFSG terms, too.
With some TLC, there are some things which this project could enable which the current in-the-wild SQlite binding cannot match, such as client-side database usage in Silverlight/Moonlight apps, or getting rid of some of the nasty per-arch bugs in “real” sqlite bindings. But I certainly won’t be rushing to see this project in the archive until it’s seen a considerable jump in maturity – both code-wise (it shows that it’s a line-by-line job), and developer-wise (I mean, really, CC-BY for software? No copy of the license in the source? No proper copyright file at all? No library – executable only?)
One difference from the Gnote situation, which may or may not matter depending on your viewpoint, is that SQlite’s licensing is in better shape than Tomboy’s (that is, every single source file in SQlite has proper headers, the same cannot be said for Tomboy). As a result, “merely” preserving headers leads to a much more compliant situation with SQlite, rather than adding headers to headerless files (and as a result declaring sole ownership at a source level). That was the biggest problem with Gnote, and the cause of my cries of “aggressive fork” – the “clean” thing to do is to make sure your file headers are all ship-shape, even if that means contacting the people you’re forking from to get problem files 100% cleared up before forking them.
It may well be the case that we simply need to pass on this, depending on the consensus regarding CC-BY 3.0 – we already used to remove a CC-BY-SA 2.5 library from Mono due to DFSG concerns. I would feel MUCH happier if it simply used the same license as “upstream” – or a similarly permissive one such as MIT/X11.
#3 by bambox on August 7th, 2009
Have a look at this:
http://code.google.com/p/csharp-sqlite/wiki/VersionHistory
Rather odd stuff. Perhaps he’s heading towards public domain in stages. Start off with an EULA, then move to MS-PL through to GPL, shifting to BSD then MIT with perhaps a hint of Apache, and finally bam, public domain.
#4 by zekopeko on August 7th, 2009
Read my comment below. The code is apparently now under MIT.
#5 by makomk on August 7th, 2009
Hmmm. I noticed Miguel de Icaza seemed very keen on the idea of some sort of Mono-based rewrite of Sqlite using this code as a starting point. (I happened to be reading #mono at the time for unrelated reasons.)
#6 by zekopeko on August 7th, 2009
mmmmm… sqlite is licensed under Public Domain. Not exactly your average LGPLv2.
Plus Hub pointed out his motivation for porting Tomboy. And yes there were some copyright problems that got fixed.
Also, the announcement clearly points to benefits which C# port of sqlite could bring to .NET/Mono developers. And it appears that it’s not going to remain a line-for-line port (somebody in the comments even said that it looks like a machine translation) but be made a true C# app with all it’s benefits.
Not exactly your average end user app that brings nothing new to the table.
#7 by Jason on August 7th, 2009
Could you explain what you mean here? I don’t want to get all worked up if I am misreading you.
#8 by zekopeko on August 7th, 2009
@Jo
I just skimmed through the trunk. It looks like there are no headers that could point under what licence the code is. But on the project page it clearly states that code is under MIT and the content is under CC-BY 3.0 . If I’m reading this correctly then that would mean that only the logo is under CC-BY and not the code. There is certainly work to be done to fix this confusion.
#9 by Karma Bot on August 7th, 2009
so it’s ok to steal other people’s work and claim it as yours? link
#10 by zekopeko on August 7th, 2009
I’m going to assume that your lack of essential reading skills and other important factors made you miss the “licence” in question: Public Domain.
And no, it’s not OK to steal other people’s work and claim it as yours.
#11 by Lex on August 7th, 2009
At least they are not porting JavaDB. With all the automated tools to translate from java to c# that could have been easier.
#12 by OkThen on August 9th, 2009
See, you guys keep trying to make this about Mono vs no Mono. I like the way you operate, 50% poor research, 50% innuendo.
Here is Miguel’s take on GNote when Roy was trying to inflame the discussion a few months ago:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/6cec640b7c4dec6f
#13 by vexorian on August 9th, 2009
Well, that’s what De Icaza thinks or wants to look like. However, there certainly was a good outcry and anti-gnote bashing when it happened. Not from de Icaza. But there was, you should ask gnote’s author about the hate mail he received.
You are the one trying to correlate mono opposition with bad reserch and innuendo, yet in your own post you seem to be using selective evidence yourself.
To think there are no zealots or extremists among the pro-mono side is to be unrealistic. The banshee case speaks for itself. An inferior app being pushed solely because of the framework it was written on. While making up rumors and attacking the one good music player we had.
#14 by zekopeko on August 9th, 2009
That’s a lie. The framework and language have nothing to do with it. If it wasn’t for the Atk# bug Banshee would be ready to replace RB in Karmic.
I love it when people start talking how the “pro-mono” (actually I-don’t-give-a-fuck-if-it-was-written-in-mono-and-use-what-you-like, but they never notice that) side are constantly shoving mono down their throat.
What we are shoving down your throat is a damn fine app IMO.