Given that Open Source is often defined as "the right to fork"; that forkability is perhaps *the* critical things that differentiates Open Source from Closed Source, I can't see how your comment makes much sense at all.

If you prefer software that can't be forked, there are plenty of commercial software licenses to choose from...

Hi Gavin@fw01.ext.atl.jboss.com! First, open source, in my own book, doesn't just mean dumping code, whether compiled or in source form, to the end user. Next, I think it's just grand for a VC-funded, 100+ person company to "fork" a codebase that has been growing and cared for over the past several years, and rebrand it into their own thing. Of course, that's all very legal and JBoss' right to do so. Now, instead of reading the marketing speak, I prefer to stick with my first opinion: Bleh.

>> Of course, that's all very legal and JBoss' right to do so.

Further, it was the *intent of the person who released the code under an open source license*!

For example, if someone wants to fork Hibernate, they do so with my blessing! That is why I released Hibernate under the LGPL. So that people can fork if they want. (It has already happened once.) So that, in the incredibly unlikely event that JBoss goes out of business tomorrow, Hibernate carries on. So that people like the guy doing an object/indexing mapping engine can reuse our code to do new and innovative things. Etc.

Forking can be a Good Thing, and the freedom to fork is at the core of the open source ethos. I suggest you try googling "freedom to fork" if you are interested in this topic. A lot of people have written on this issue.

Now, if JBoss was a company like RedHat, which makes money by re-packaging huge quantities of code written by other people, and then contributes a few drops back, I could understand the "bleh". But JBoss employees write almost all of the code in our products (much more than most of the other OSS companies around) and we don't try to make money from stuff that is not substantially our own creation.

Dear Gavin, let's reserve talking about intent for the person who actually wrote that code, no?

It's easy to fork/rewrite a Wiki engine. It's much harder to work with other people trying to enhance and improve a common codebase. I see JBoss prefers the easy road, and reduces the term "open source" to "stuff we do". Open source, to me, has different connotations.

If this is how you see the world, fine. If this is what you're legally entitled to, great. But going the extra mile and being a better community member (and I understand you guys love laughing at the community thing), that's clearly not what JBoss wants or is able to, and that has nothing to do with "open source", but with its primary goal of filling the boss' pockets. So quit the open source mantra, please.

It's a pretty extensive rewrite - so much that it's practically impossible to merge any work from them into JSPWiki. I don't mind the fork, but I'm miffed at them removing my copyright notices from the code. They've already been notified, though, and they promised to restore them.

They even took a way older version of JSPWiki as a basis, because it was simpler to fork. It's not really a community fork, as none of the JSPWiki plugins, templates, filters, or any modules can be run on JBoss Wiki. They're just using plenty of code.

Of course, things would've probably been simpler, if they had worked with us to get the things done that they needed to.