GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

News pertaining to the site and the forums, as well as guild discussions and events in the world of Uru.

GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

Postby Trylon » Wed Jan 23, 2008 2:01 pm

Shorah everyone,
as you have certainly noticed, there is a bit of confusion about the forking of PyPRP into GoW-PyPRP.
In this statement I will try to remove some of that confusion.

Forking
Basically a fork is a branch in the development process. A project is forked when a group of developers want to go down a different path and implement new features in a different way than the original authors of the software.

As long as the license permits it, this is perfectly legal.
In this case, PyPRP was under Gnu Public License (GPL), which allows forks and derivative works, as long as they abide by the GPL. Basically the GPL states that if you release anything, you must make the source code available too, give credit to the original author(s), and put the new project under GPL as well. We did just that.

Background
The decision to fork was made by a number of PyPRP developers who invested a lot of time in developing for PyPRP, and also in the Guild of Writers. While some of them are currently councilors or assistant councilors, the decision was mostly made from their developers point of view.

It is difficult to precisely say why we forked, as there is a bit of history that plays a role here.
Perhaps the best way of explaining it is to recap the events leading up to this:

(These are the events as we perceived them, not neccesarily the fully objective truth)
1) Over the past 18 months we heard nothing substantial from Almlys PyPRP-wise.
2) We invested a lot of time and effort in the additions to PyPRP.
3) The GoW was started and became popular. There was a growing push for centralization, and and linking to an external, nearly dead site for tools was becoming an annoyance, especially because the GoW site was fully alive. More and more new writers find their way here, further increasing the desire for keeping things centralized.
4) A month or two ago Almlys appeared, and among other things he accused us of doing an illegal fork (not abiding the GPL). (I think that that actually gave us the idea to do it in the first place.)
Working under someone who isn't involved for a long time and then suddenly accuses you of stuff you didn't do, is not someting that anyone likes.
5) Almlys announces in the same thread as point #4 that he thought pyprp was dead and wants to combine work on PyPRP and his 7D7 project.
We take this thread as a sign that Almlys has lost interest in uru and is focusing on 7D7
6) We did a major rewrite of most of the plugin code, which gives us essentially a whole new version of it.
7) The history mentioned before, along with the knowledge of Almlys flammable temper makes us decide to go solo. We take Almlys total absence from PyPRP development (aside from forum maintenance) as a sign that he has lost interest in Uru.
8) Because we know Almlys flammable temper, we hesitate to contact him early on.
As the day of the new plugin release closes, no one has contacted Almlys yet, so unfortunately, we announce the fork a bit too late to Almlys.

The situation now
We respect Almlys, and also his efforts on developing the first version of PyPRP.
We hope that he respects us, and the work we did in the past as well.
That being said, we agree that we might have handled the situation better, and apologize to Almlys for any offense we may have given him.

While we will not choose to work under Almlys again, we would like to invite him, once more, to join us in PyPRP development here at the Guild of Writers.

I hope that this informs you enough of the situation.
Regards,
--Trylon
One day I ran through the cleft for the fiftieth time, and found that uru held no peace for me anymore.
User avatar
Trylon
 
Posts: 1446
Joined: Fri Sep 28, 2007 11:08 pm
Location: Gone from Uru

Re: GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

Postby Almlys » Wed Jan 23, 2008 5:31 pm

Ok, let's go again and again, and again...

Trylon wrote:Forking
Basically a fork is a branch in the development process. A project is forked when a group of developers want to go down a different path and implement new features in a different way than the original authors of the software.

The difference is that in this fork, both branches are going the same way.

Trylon wrote:As long as the license permits it, this is perfectly legal.
In this case, PyPRP was under Gnu Public License (GPL), which allows forks and derivative works, as long as they abide by the GPL. Basically the GPL states that if you release anything, you must make the source code available too, give credit to the original author(s), and put the new project under GPL as well. We did just that.

That's correct, and perfect. There is no best way to explain it.

Trylon wrote:1) Over the past 18 months we heard nothing substantial from Almlys PyPRP-wise.

As I said, short story: I was on another place.

Trylon wrote:2) We invested a lot of time and effort in the additions to PyPRP.

I may have been inactive, but I have been fully aware of all updates done in the repository.

Trylon wrote:3) The GoW was started and became popular. There was a growing push for centralization, and and linking to an external, nearly dead site for tools was becoming an annoyance, especially because the GoW site was fully alive. More and more new writers find their way here, further increasing the desire for keeping things centralized.

Let's say that I hate centralization. (I think that distributed stuff always worked better than centralized stuff, with a centralized system there is only one point of failure, well...)
About this "dead" site, this stuff is really what turns me on fire. The Alcugs Project site is and will be open and maintained. Ok, I know that updating the software does not turn on any shiny light or something that says that the site is maintained, in fact if the site was really unmaintained the forum would have been wipped by an SQL injection attack a lot of time ago due to a security hole present in one of the versions of phpbb used.

Trylon wrote:4) A month or two ago Almlys appeared, and among other things he accused us of doing an illegal fork (not abiding the GPL). (I think that that actually gave us the idea to do it in the first place.)
Working under someone who isn't involved for a long time and then suddenly accuses you of stuff you didn't do, is not someting that anyone likes.

That sounds like I magically disappear and appear, that's funny because I have been always there, not posting but I have been present in some type of lurking state, and yes I have been lurking over at GoW before I posted that stuff.
About that accusation. I never wanted to make those posts sound as an accusation, I was just burned about reading that you were going to fork the wiki (copy and paste all articles and continue on another place (something that it's perfectly legal, but you must link back to the original article)), so if you were forking the wiki it was obvious that you were going to end forking pyprp, and I wasn't wrong. This besides reading more and more time that some people was working on rewritting some stuff, that for some reason did not appear on the repository was a bit suspicious, also when you have another developer waiting for those contributions so he can continue contributing.

Trylon wrote:5) Almlys announces in the same thread as point #4 that he thought pyprp was dead and wants to combine work on PyPRP and his 7D7 project.

Can you post a quote were I said that pyprp was dead, because I did a search of the words pyprp and dead and I did not see anything related on what are you saying. So please don't put in my mouth things that I have not said.
Now, about that "combine work on PyPRP and his 7D7". For infinitesima vez them are completely different projects. Now, what I see/understand re-using code between both projects. As a developer, you now that there is a class called "alcConvexHull", this is the best example of code that will be re-used between both projects. If I need that code for 7d7, why PyPRP cannot get the updates from the 7d7 project? (them are on separated repositories). In fact improving the current implementation of the alcConvexHull (by using an external C++ library that does the same thing 200% better) we may improve a bit the overall plugin export time. In fact the GUI code that I'm gona be implementing on 7d7 and thus PyPRP is from another Blender plugin, GPL is great for this things... I don't know why I need to write all the GUI stuff from scratch when someone wrote an awesome interface for easily writing GUIs for Blender.

Trylon wrote:We take this thread as a sign that Almlys has lost interest in uru and is focusing on 7D7

I don't know how I need to say things. I don't now Chinese, but I may need to learn it, I suppose that my English sucks a lot and that we are speaking different languages, or that I'm just an useless moron writing nonsenses.

Trylon wrote:6) We did a major rewrite of most of the plugin code, which gives us essentially a whole new version of it.

And?, so I join a project, I rewrite part of the code, and this just gives me the right to go away and fork it. Yes I can legally do it, but you will never see me doing that thing, I'm not that type of person.

Trylon wrote:7) The history mentioned before, along with the knowledge of Almlys flammable temper makes us decide to go solo. We take Almlys total absence from PyPRP development (aside from forum maintenance) as a sign that he has lost interest in Uru.

flammable temper? Ok, yes I can be a bit crazy about some things, ok, but it's not to be interpreted in the way that you did, but well.
total absence? You don't know what are you talking or saying.
forum maintenance? The best way to offend a forum administrator (and turn his flammable temper to the highest levels) is to say to him that is not maintaining it. As I can see you don't know nothing about forum maintenance, or about the inners of Almlys.org server. What were you expecting, a post every time that I logged into the forum? Details about every single update done to the forum software, and the server software? Sometimes I posted stuff on the forum, other times I posted updates in my blog (yes my fault for not mirroring a copy to the forum), and sometimes I considered that it was not necessary to post an update.

Trylon wrote:8) Because we know Almlys flammable temper, we hesitate to contact him early on.

D'oh, my flammable temper, that's not a valid excuse. What could have happened to you? Were you expecting that I was going to launch a nuclear attack to your home for sending just some E-mails?

Trylon wrote:As the day of the new plugin release closes, no one has contacted Almlys yet, so unfortunately, we announce the fork a bit too late to Almlys.

And very good date the one that you decided to announce it.

Trylon wrote:The situation now
We respect Almlys, and also his efforts on developing the first version of PyPRP.

Words don't always reflect the actions performed by some people.

Trylon wrote:We hope that he respects us, and the work we did in the past as well.

I'm not sure what are you expecting me to think about you.

Trylon wrote:That being said, we agree that we might have handled the situation better, and apologize to Almlys for any offense we may have given him.

Let's hope that future situations are handled a bit better. Apologies accepted, although there is now another thing. So le't see if it can bee clarified.
For what I have been reading, It looks like I'm perceived as some type of angry big green monster (or some type of evil crazy mad angry ogre). As far as I know I'm not green, yet.
I suppose that for the way that I think and write, I can for some reason or another hurt the sensibility of the reader. Rumours, lack of communication between other things, make things like this to happen.
I never wanted to offend anyone, I never wanted to attack anyone, and I never wanted to accuse anyone for anything. If you for some reason are feeling offended, attacked or accused by anything that I have said, please re-read again, and if you still feel that as some type off attack/offence/accusation, then please post it, instead of doing a fork and waiting some time to post the announcement of the fork.
Also you can PM me, send me e-mails, send any type of garbage by e-mail, etc.. as far as I know I don't have any type of secret installation filled with nukes with your names.

Trylon wrote:While we will not choose to work under Almlys again, we would like to invite him, once more, to join us in PyPRP development here at the Guild of Writers.


As you were working for me as my slave. As far as I know at Alcugs everybody did exactly what they wanted to do without any problem and complication, and it will continue in the same way. You could have done at alcugs exactly the same work that you are doing here.
"we would like to invite him", that starts to look like that typical stupid situation of two people that don't directly talk between them and use someone else to send messages between them.
No, my work will continue on the original place, were everything started, and were the official PyPRP plugin will continue it's development, besides that I wasted some time witting a nice script that will keep the Alcugs subversion repository in sync with the fork, and would be a waste of time to drop it. (In addition that I'm more comfortable working with my repository, the new one it's a whole lot slower and would reduce a lot the productivity).
Almlys
 
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Jan 12, 2008 3:54 pm

Re: GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

Postby Nadnerb » Wed Jan 23, 2008 6:19 pm

Almlys wrote:
Trylon wrote:The history mentioned before, along with the knowledge of Almlys flammable temper makes us decide to go solo. We take Almlys total absence from PyPRP development (aside from forum maintenance) as a sign that he has lost interest in Uru.

flammable temper? Ok, yes I can be a bit crazy about some things, ok, but it's not to be interpreted in the way that you did, but well.
total absence? You don't know what are you talking or saying.
forum maintenance? The best way to offend a forum administrator (and turn his flammable temper to the highest levels) is to say to him that is not maintaining it. As I can see you don't know nothing about forum maintenance, or about the inners of Almlys.org server. What were you expecting, a post every time that I logged into the forum? Details about every single update done to the forum software, and the server software? Sometimes I posted stuff on the forum, other times I posted updates in my blog (yes my fault for not mirroring a copy to the forum), and sometimes I considered that it was not necessary to post an update.

Not to get mixed up in this little domain squabble, but I figured a misunderstanding should be corrected. I should point out that the English meaning of that sentence ("We take Almlys total absence from PyPRP development (aside from forum maintenance) as a sign that he has lost interest in Uru.") is that Almlys appeared to be totally absent from PyPRP development, but that he was still maintaining the forum.
Image
Live KI: 34914 MOULa KI: 23247 Gehn KI: 11588 Available Ages: TunnelDemo3, BoxAge, Odema
Nadnerb
 
Posts: 1057
Joined: Fri Sep 28, 2007 8:01 pm
Location: US (Eastern Time)

Re: GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

Postby andylegate » Wed Jan 23, 2008 7:24 pm

Just as an outside observation here........

Might it be best to state what each branches goals are?

For example, I am pretty sure that the Branch that I'll call the GoW PyPRP is geared to the goal of either helping with the development of Age Creation Tools that can be used eventually by people for MOUL, or for providing tools that will help those aspiring Age Creators to learn how to make Ages for Uru, so that in time, they will be ready for Age Creation Tools that Cyan may release one day for MOUL.
At least, both ideas are based in providing support to the Guild of Writers for Myst Online : Uru Live, not really Uru CC. Uru CC is really only a learning platform for both the GoW and the Guild of Maintainers.

Now, what is the goal of Alcugs? Has it changed? Is it still the same?

If not, and if the goals are significatly different, then a branching off of development of the PyPRP not only makes sense, but would of ended up happening anyways.
"I'm still trying to find the plKey for Crud!"
Image
Blender Age Creation Tutorials
3DS Max Age Creation Tutorials
User avatar
andylegate
 
Posts: 2348
Joined: Mon Oct 01, 2007 7:47 am

Re: GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

Postby Grogyan » Wed Jan 23, 2008 8:52 pm

Again from an outsiders view of it all, The "Guild of Writers" was a concept to centralize all the forums, and wiki and plugin(s) long ago. I can remember quite well after the downfall of UruLive, that although "hacking" the answers out of the game was happening behind closed doors, it was really a small group acting as a guild, then it grew with few plugins available, a Max one, a Maya one, and work began on PyPrp from Almlys.

While the other plugins disappeared, mainly due to the fact that people had to buy an expensive product to use the plugin, and at that stage Bryce wasn't a free or cheap option either, Blender was the obvious choice.
While I appreciate Almlys doing the hard yards in the early development of PyPrp, the fact remains that in order to develop the plugin further, another branch/fork would occur, as it was mentioned many a time, it was a mess of code.

Now with the GOW PyPrp fork, its now a much cleaner code, which means its easier to maintain.

I know from reading the Alcugs forum, that Almlys attention has drifted from PyPrp to 7d7, but even during that time, there had been so little mention from Almlys about his intentions, expectations, or even some random message ONCE a month would have let us know that Almlys still wanted to carry on with the development.

I think we should respect that if it wasn't for Almlys, we wouldn't have a tool AT ALL.
I do think though that if Almlys wasn't doing the plugin at the time he did, we would have gotten the plugin much much later then now.


So i'm saying that its an all around effort, and the fork to better develop the plugin was well overdue, but wouldn't happen at all without Almlys early hard work, and hosting a fairly accessible wiki on the plugin.

Please stop bickering and fighting, Trylon has already apologized, even ready for, Almlys to be part of this new fork.
Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all
User avatar
Grogyan
 
Posts: 1203
Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2007 1:27 am

Re: GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

Postby Erik » Thu Jan 24, 2008 8:42 am

Here is another outsiders view...

Some months ago I tried to start creating an Age. There was no GoW back then. I found the instructions at Almlys' wiki hard to understand and they also seemed to be out-dated. Since the DRC announced that they wanted to resurrect the old Guilds, I've been following the developments here closely. I really like it that things are being centralised, it makes learning the Art a lot more easier for people like me. I really like the new wiki for example.
Apparently Trylon and the other developers thought they could better serve the needs of the Writers by forking. That is completely legal according to the GPL. People don't even have to give a reason to fork. By using the GPL for PyPRP, Almlys essentially gave people permission to fork off the main branch. So this shouldn't be a problem at all. All the recent discussions about this aren't even unnecessary. I can understand that Almlys doesn't like the current situation, but then he should have used another license for his project in my opinion. There's nothing wrong with what the developers are doing now, and if will indeed help the developers to create better tools, then I will support the decision.

I hope that if Almlys wants to focus on Age Building tools for Uru again, that he will contribute to the project, on this branch. I'm reading that the developers here cleaned up much of the original code. That's good news for Almlys as well, isn't it?

Anyway, I hope we will be able to leave this issue behind us soon, and focus on the process of Writing and the creating of tools, rather than to discuss legitimate decisions that were made.
User avatar
Erik
 
Posts: 124
Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 7:49 am
Location: the Netherlands

Re: GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

Postby Almlys » Fri Jan 25, 2008 3:54 am

Nadnerb wrote:Not to get mixed up in this little domain squabble, but I figured a misunderstanding should be corrected. I should point out that the English meaning of that sentence ("We take Almlys total absence from PyPRP development (aside from forum maintenance) as a sign that he has lost interest in Uru.") is that Almlys appeared to be totally absent from PyPRP development, but that he was still maintaining the forum.


Thanks Nadnerb.
Misunderstanding understood.

andylegate wrote:Might it be best to state what each branches goals are?
[...]
Now, what is the goal of Alcugs? Has it changed? Is it still the same?


As far as I know, we are doing the same.

Grogyan wrote:Now with the GOW PyPrp fork, its now a much cleaner code, which means its easier to maintain.


I'm not sure if I'm understanding well the message, you are just saying that we could not have maintained a cleaner version of the code at Alcugs?

Grogyan wrote:I know from reading the Alcugs forum, that Almlys attention has drifted from PyPrp to 7d7, but even during that time, there had been so little mention from Almlys about his intentions, expectations, or even some random message ONCE a month would have let us know that Almlys still wanted to carry on with the development.

I said several times that I was on another place.

Erik wrote:I found the instructions at Almlys' wiki hard to understand and they also seemed to be out-dated.

Hosting and maintaing the Alcugs Project wiki at a server that is of my own property does not automatically mean that it's "Almlys' wiki". It's the Alcugs Project wiki. So please, stop with the Almlys' wiki, Almlys' forum, etc.. Almlys administrates that stuff, yes it's correct. But it's the Alcugs Project wiki, forum, etc.. Let's call things by the correct names.

Erik wrote:Apparently Trylon and the other developers thought they could better serve the needs of the Writers by forking. That is completely legal according to the GPL.

I already said that it's legal.

Erik wrote:People don't even have to give a reason to fork.

There is always a reason, if not the fork it's just pointless.

Erik wrote:Almlys doesn't like the current situation, but then he should have used another license for his project in my opinion.

For me it's pointless were the code is being hosted and updated as far as I can keep the original repository up to date. If they don't want to do the commits to the Alcugs repository, then I will do myself for them.
I only use Free Open Source Licenses on my projects, any other type of license is and would have been incompatible with my goals and visions. Besides that if I'm not wrong or if they don't have any type of exception (I think that there is one), code that runs inside blender needs to be compatible with blender's license (that it's GPL v2), but I think that they have an exception, but I just didn't worry about checking it because it was clear that I was going through the GPL way.
Almlys
 
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Jan 12, 2008 3:54 pm

Re: GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

Postby Grogyan » Fri Jan 25, 2008 4:55 am

Almlys wrote:
Grogyan wrote:Now with the GOW PyPrp fork, its now a much cleaner code, which means its easier to maintain.


I'm not sure if I'm understanding well the message, you are just saying that we could not have maintained a cleaner version of the code at Alcugs?


Not entirely, without much of major rewrite of the plugin, which was the intention long ago, though may not have actually said.

I believe I could dig up the actual messages, but that would only add something highly volatile to the burning mass.

I don't know much about other people, but I do like to try and read what the plugin was doing, old (18 months+ ago) versus, the output interface for debugging purposes now, now is a lot easier to read, and like all debugging output, if its easier to read, its easier to maintain the physical code, and I was only commenting what has already been mentioned, about cleaning up the code.
You original plugin worked, some what magically and I don't want to say more than that, because I still want my head in one piece.
Almlys wrote:
Grogyan wrote:I know from reading the Alcugs forum, that Almlys attention has drifted from PyPrp to 7d7, but even during that time, there had been so little mention from Almlys about his intentions, expectations, or even some random message ONCE a month would have let us know that Almlys still wanted to carry on with the development.

I said several times that I was on another place.


I was on holiday in Europe in late August, and I still was able to post messages on the UruLive forums, unless where you were had no connection to the world wide web, it still would have been good if just a quick message on your forum once a month, month update? Would have gone down well.

Please stop, step back, be proud of what you did, knowing/not knowing which direction the plugin went, there is plenty to do, to add in the plugin, both Alcugs and the GOW versions, though its often, "better to go with the flow than to go against the grain".
Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all
User avatar
Grogyan
 
Posts: 1203
Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2007 1:27 am

Re: GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

Postby Almlys » Fri Jan 25, 2008 1:06 pm

Grogyan wrote:I don't know much about other people, but I do like to try and read what the plugin was doing, old (18 months+ ago) versus, the output interface for debugging purposes now, now is a lot easier to read, and like all debugging output, if its easier to read, its easier to maintain the physical code, and I was only commenting what has already been mentioned, about cleaning up the code.
You original plugin worked, some what magically and I don't want to say more than that, because I still want my head in one piece.

The goals when writting the original plugin was to have something that worked, and exported an age ASAP. Now, the new goals or at least mine, is to improve the overall plugin usability (Packaging the plugin, automating the installation, and some GUIs for interacting with the plugin).

Grogyan wrote:
Almlys wrote:I said several times that I was on another place.


I was on holiday in Europe in late August, and I still was able to post messages on the UruLive forums, unless where you were had no connection to the world wide web, it still would have been good if just a quick message on your forum once a month, month update? Would have gone down well.


That's not the point. I went to Lisbon, and I was able to ssh to the box were the Alcugs project is running through the hotel wifi. If you had read some of my previous messages you will now that I have been going through some personal problems.
Almlys
 
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Jan 12, 2008 3:54 pm

Re: GoW PyPRP - Some clarity regarding the fork from Alcugs

Postby Paradox » Fri Jan 25, 2008 1:15 pm

Almlys wrote:If you had read some of my previous messages you will now that I have been going through some personal problems.


This has indeed been stated by Almlys multiple times, and people still seem to be accusing him of the same things.
Personal problems are completely understandable, and Almlys should not be held responsible for his apparent lack of activity during those times. I imagine that it was beyond his control.
Paradox
 
Posts: 1290
Joined: Fri Sep 28, 2007 6:48 pm
Location: Canada

Next

Return to Guild News

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 0 guests

cron