VLC on versiontracker?

[Christophe Massiot]

À (At) 8:36 +0300 13/05/2002, Bill Eldridge écrivait (wrote) :

>They *TELL* you they've done nothing special, just doing nightly
>builds that installs nicely (the Mac/Next way, not the Unix way)
>on OS X. They give credit to videolan.  I really don't understand
>the problem.  (rpmfind.net has a service where they track rpm's
>you can install on different Linuxes - what's the difference?
>They're just packaging. But I use rpmfind.net all the time)

I completely disagree with you, Bill, and I'll try to explain you 
why. Basically, this is for legality, fame and misinforming.

Packaging a GPL program without giving away the LICENCE and AUTHORS 
files isn't legal. Not proposing to download the source of their 
version isn't either, and the page lists the software as freeware - 
no it's not freeware. Now, as it is written, the web page introduces 
a confusion which leads to believe that Giga Services wrote the 
software (the product info page links to Giga Services).

Now, what I find deeply wrong about this, is that they give away the 
CVS of VLC on a high-traffic web-site, without warning us, nor 
warning the users on how unstable it might be, and _under the name 
VideoLAN Client_. This is very misleading, since the 4,000 users who 
downloaded it (this is really a high-traffic site) can be lead to 
thing that VLC is a piece of shit which doesn't work at all (read the 
comments). Please bear in mind that Version Tracker is for Mac users 
what freshmeat is for Linux users.

It emphasizes the unannounced DivX feature of the CVS of VLC. If it 
is not official, it is for a good reason, and maybe we don't want it 
to be announced to 5,000 people without our consent. It still needs 
tuning, and that tuning will be done by 0.3.2 which is due in a few 
days. Now in trying to spare a few days and to take credits for 
what's been done, this company is ruining our stabilization efforts 
and release cycle.

So to me it looks like a company trying to hijack the development 
effort on VLC, make a parallel versioning scheme, and take the 
credits for what's been done. We can't allow a company to take such 
credit (what would we say to AT&T, BT, Philips, IBM who have 
contributed code or money ?).

I have sent them a mail yesterday asking for the ownership of the 
version tracker web pages, and proposed that their development effort 
be integrated into VLC CVS, with VLC's usual release cycle. If they 
do not agree with that, they can start a fork of the project under a 
different name.

-- 
Christophe Massiot.

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