Thoughts from a long walk home

Hi,

what I get from the postings here is, that people are angry with Lars, because
he effectively stopped working on eGW 1.x, after being one of the big forces
behind the eGW development, which leaves some important code unmaintained.
Most of the other criticisms seem to be rooted somewhere near that fact.

I can understand those feelings from an emotional point of view, but not
really from the concepts of the GPL.

The agreement between the members of a FOSS project is basicly supplied by the
license of the code. The widely used license that eGW uses only guarantees,
that the receiver of a changed eGW has the right to receive the sourcecode as
well. This does not bind developers in any way as far as the nature of the
changes is concerned.

I see this in other projects every day. Developers sometimes vanish for a
thousand different reasons, or they shift their focus because of another
thousand reasons. This is normal. Basically a user or co-developer has no
right to demand anything else from any developer of GPL software than the
sourcecode of changed versions of the program. And not having the right to
demand something also means, you don't have the right to be angry at someone
who does not meet your demands. Of course it might create a problem for you
that you're stuck with unmaintained code, but that's just it. This can happen
and that's clear from the start.

This leads me to the conclusion, the only question regarding the current
situation in eGW is this: Will benefits come for both sides from developing
Tine within egroupware.org, or not?

[My personal answer: Absolutely. Compatibility between the two is an important
advantage for both and will not happen, if the devs don't use the same tools
and communication channels. Also, nobody who ever debugged eGW can deny that
it's suffering from its' legacy. So in the best case, if Tine really manages
to be a completely compatible rewrite of eGW written with clean coding
concepts, it would be like a lottery win. And in the worst case, if Tine will
be a failure, eGW lost manpower for half a year or so.]

Basically my advice is to find back to cooperation to the extend, which is
technically possible. For the supporters of eGW 1.x, this means to accept the
fact, that maybe there will come a time when much of their code will be
replaced. For the Tine people this means to accept working on the same
platform as a person, they don't like personally (but this really should be
possible, that's the case in any environment with many people in it).

Carsten
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