On Aug 27, 2:28*pm, Martin Gregorie
wrote:
On Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:17:51 -0700, Darryl Ramm wrote:
How is what you wrote in any way relevent to the point that effectlively
underground wide distribution of LK8000 is *copyright infringement and
violation of the GPL? Like Michael I also find this behavior worrying.

Explanatory.

On thinking back to when LK8000 was forked, almost a year ago, IIRC the
trigger for the fork was a refusal of the XCSoar project leaders to
accept a large set of changes, all connected with the PNA implementation.
I have no idea why this happened, but it could well have been due to
source incompatibility, since at the same time Max was cleaning up and
refactoring the main code base in an effort to improve its
maintainability.

All I know was that the then main PNA developer vanished from sight for a
while before setting up the LK8000 fork. In the interim XCSoar 5.2.4
appeared. It did not, and still does not, have an official PNA release.
Anybody running XCSoar 5.2.4 on a PNA is, like me, running one of Max
Kellerman's two unofficial versions. I'm very grateful for them:
otherwise I'd still be running 5.2.2.

I don't know where that leaves your theory about the LK8000 project
refusing to pass updates back to the root project: there's a big
difference between a refusal to contribute and having that contribution
rejected.

--
martin@ * | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org * * * |

Martin

This is not really irrelevant to the issue at hand of whether XK80000
is meeting source code provision requirements of the GPL or not. I
have never made any comment about the provision of code changes to the
the original XCSoar project, or those developers accepting or not
those changes, etc. And whatever happened there does not modify the
rights of the original copyright owners or modify any of the GPL
license terms.

The original developers do not have to be provided with any special
access any different to anybody else, they do not need to like the
changes to "their code" or approve them. If somebody else wants to
contribute but they have a falling out and that developer(s) takes the
code and branch/rewrite it and makes it better -- then too bad. And if
those changes becomes popular -- maybe a sign they should have
listened to those developers. And maybe sometimes everybody is better
off with multiple branches, especially if they address different uses/
end-users better.

Developers working with GPL code are mostly free to do whatever they
want, including things that original developers do not agree with -
but they need to make clear those changes have been made and they need
to provide the source code to the user community in the ways I've
outlined in other posts in this thread. That is the apparent issue
here.

Darryl