Threatened – update May 23, 2007
Posted by Florian in GPE, Maemo, Source, World.trackback
Just a small update:
The handhelds.org mailinglist archive has the initial thread about GPE wich gives us quite some interesting information:
- The term GPE was not used by George France first.
- GPE was not even started at handhelds.org
- The first GPE website ever made is still there – of course now pointing to gpe.linuxtogo.org
I might happen some accident to that archive in near future… but well, there are quite some copies around. :)
We heared the argument that hh.org was a big product and GPE was just a part from it… well, the handhelds.org website does say something different. It lists GPE among the projects:
Handhelds, Linux and Heroes 
For the record, ignore comments from known handhelds.org fanboys named:
* George France
* Russ Nelson
* Rene Wagner
So I want to dig a little bit into facts:
1. Somehwere in the past GPE project is founded (I remember Opie where around some four years ago, if not more)
2. GPE becomes a part of handhelds.org as hosted project
3. GPE decides to move stuff away from handhelds.org due of personal/emotional differences and difficulties (is that right?)
4. GPE stuff is moved to new server
5. Holder of handhelds.org becomes angry and start to claim that GPE where illegal fork and that all ownership is still his. Trademark issues starts to appear
Question is – on what legal/moral/other basis handhelds.org owner bases his claims about “ownership” of open source project? And biggest question – why he is doing it?
for point number 3: It’s hard to contribute to a project if user accounts keep having ‘accidents’ during ‘routine maintenance’.
Pēteris,
Regarding #1, Opie originally started in late 2001/early 2002 and grew out of the packages of QPE that Benjamin Long was building for iPaq users. The handhelds.org mailing list for opie first went live on Jan 22 2002, but I think the builds were being done for at least one or two months before that happened.
To get some perspective on this: I remember a George France being quite involved in disruptive flamefests in the arm linux and linux-usb -mailing lists (this was way back — maybe seven years ago). Is this the same guy or a different George?
jku: same guy
@Pēteris, GPE was always a community project. If Nils had wanted it to be his personal property, free to move whereever he wanted, why didn’t he host it on kernelconcepts? Why did he try to convince other people to start working on the project before him? Read the other emails in the archive, not just the one Florian wants you to read. Answer: because it was always a community project. Florian is trying to frame handhelds.org as if it were merely a hosting site, like SourceForge. Never was. All projects there were the creation of the community. There was split authority between projects because we didn’t want people like Florian to be able to delete anywhere in the CVS tree. As it was, Florian deleted GPE from the tree when he “moved” (forked) GPE. Who knows what damage he would have done if we didn’t have projects?
And yes, the story about you moving GPE was deleted from the front page, because it was not correct and made it appear as if handhelds.org approved. You forked GPE, without renaming it. You didn’t “move” it.
I’ve posted an article on handhelds.org in response to Florian’s claims.
To Russ:
Quite interesting… you claim to be not affiliated with hh.org but want to know I deleted some CVS tree? Well… for some strange reason Mr. France locked the mailinglist that people can not verify that anymore. Just read this one: http://enterprise.linux.com/comments.pl?sid=38601&op=&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&tid=41&pid=99453#99456
So unluckily people will have to check the CVS history to find out that what you say is a lie. So please let’s come down and start an objective discussion again.
And about that fork vs. move discussion: I really wonder how long does it taks for you to accept that GPE at handhelds.org is dead.