Re: The FreeRDP fork

On Tue, 15 Mar 2011, Marc-André Moreau wrote:

> Yes, I remember the discussion we had. You have to forgive me for being a developer: I have an opinion on how it should
> be done; which technical solution is the best. You claimed that your solution was better, I disagreed. No consensus was
> reached and no majority pushed your solution. Matt didn't step in. The existing implementation stayed.
> 
> 
> Personally, I don't care.

Of course you do. We all want to develop the best code and attract many 
users.


> I was just saying that in practice, my solution brought us more users,

Are you saying that you have some statistics that indicates that FreeRDP 
is more popular than rdesktop?


>       I don't see any particular strange about this process, it happens all the time in the open source community. Did
>       you really expect me to remove my keyboard implementation and replace it with yours even though I did not think
>       it was better?
> 
> 
> Yes, there was something strange: you didn't seem to truly understand the subject. Maybe you did, but you really failed to
> show it.

Forgive me for not being perfect...


> First, I was not offered a separate subversion branch. The problem with every contributor maintaining their own set of
> patches is that it really slows down development efforts. Instead, I got that email from Jay saying that he liked my idea of
> forking, which I did. If you can consider me starting my own fork being "maintaining my own implementation, that would sooner
> or later get enough supporters", well, that's what happened. We forked. People liked it, and ditched rdesktop to work on

I was not suggesting a complete fork or maintaining many out of tree 
patches. The idea was to have *only* the alternative keyboard 
implementation outside the rdesktop trunk, until a majority wanted it.


> Actually, Peter, I am very thankful: for the last couple of years, there was a lot of interest in developing an RDP client,
> but rdesktop failed to properly receive those contributors. All it took was a fork to get all those contributors willing to
> spend all their time working on a good RDP client. You've simply made my life awesome by keeping all those people from being
> fully accepted until I open my door wide open for them to come in and contribute. What else can I say? You can justify
> yourself all that you want, just look at freerdp-devel and rdesktop-devel daily activity: one of them is filled with
> discussions, and the other one with feature or bug requests half the time. I let you guess which one is which.

Don't celebrate yet. If we forget about ourselves for a moment and take on 
the community and user perspective, I don't think the current situation is 
very good. The developer base is divided. The feature set is divided, with 
many features only available in one version. The legal status of the 
FreeRDP license change is still unclear, but if the migration to the 
Apache license is done, these two similar projects cannot share code. Many 
distributions and vendors are currently shipping rdesktop. They now need 
to choose between two similar projects, and possible migrate to FreeRDP. 
I've worked with software long enough so I know that even if this is just 
a matter of changing the package names and documentation, this may take a 
substantial amount of time.


Rgds, 
---
Peter Åstrand		ThinLinc Chief Developer
Cendio AB		http://www.cendio.com
Wallenbergs gata 4
583 30 Linköping	Phone: +46-13-21 46 00

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