Years ago I wrote a p2p file sharing program and open-sourced under GPL. Soon a group contacted me for forking the project; I gave them my blessing and wished them luck.

Later I looked at their fork. All they did was adding their names to the copyright and the new project name to the comment section for all the hundreds of files. I was frustrated as this was a clear case of taking copyright ownership for the software. I asked them to remove their names from the copyright unless it's new changes by them but they said GPL allowed it. I contacted FSF for clarification and FSF replied that it's allowed as changing the comment constituted a new change. It's a bunch of BS. It took the rosy glasses off my naive self and soured my view on open sourcing my software in the future.

If you asked me 5 years ago if I thought something like this could happen I'd have said no. Then I relocated to SiValley and experienced Machiavellian engineers for the first time in my 20+ year career. It's good to remember that not everyone puts technology and community first. Some people will do whatever it takes to make a name for themselves, even if that just means being slightly less forgotten than they would have been previously.

It happens.

As is said of academic politics: the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small.[1]

Back at the dawn of the dot-com age, just as Linux was starting to boom, and the first IPOs (Red Hat, VA Linux) were occurring, a company appeared out of nowhere^WReno, Nevada (same thing), called "Linux One", claiming to have their own novel Linux distro. Oh, and plans for its own IPO.

It proved to be little more than a search-and-replace of "Red Hat" with "Linux one", though there were also some contributions from MandrakeSoft, another distro at the time. Stealing is copying from one source, curation is copying from several....

The thing is that, at least so far as the software is concerned, that's pretty much perfectly kosher under the GNU GPL and other Free Software / Open Source licences which comprised the scope of Red Hat's offering. In terms of copyright and licensing ... there was nothing actually wrong with this. Skeevy as all getout, yes. But not a GPL (or BSD, or MIT, or Apache, or ...) violation. (The company may have failed its source provision obligations for the GPL, however.)

The robustness of the IPO failing, er, filing, might have raised a few eyebrows elsewhere though. I seem to recall it being cancelled rather quietly, there's

The Register published an investigation of the episode at the time: https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/02/linuxone_takes_more_t...

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Notes:

1. See: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/

I'm interested in audio on Linux, especially recently and I know neither who those people are nor what NSM / Non does. It's a bizarre post that could use a lot more context.

The title is also weird - not only is Linux audio not dead, it's doing better than ever with the recent pipewire work.

As a guess, the past year or eighteen months has probably been worse than usual. With a global pandemic on, people were stressed and people who feel helpless about very real and large problems often get controlling and nitpicky about anything they feel they actually can control.

When all parties to a drama are equally stressed and handling it similarly, it's a recipe for escalation with little hope of real solutions.

As of late it seems to be becoming more of a problem.

Where we used to have the good will of others we now have a tide of ill intents it would seem.

Whilst such things have been common in large corporation office political culture for decades, too see it play out in the wild like this in open source, is just shocking.

Sadly it does seem to be becoming more and more, more since some view open source/projects as potential revenue streams and be it irc, or some carefully nurtured project that has grown over a lifetime, to be rug pulled by such `political games` all in the end for what I dare say be some agenda greed. It just saddens us all.

Kind of. Big scraps? No, however it is worth pointing out that small open source communities can be a melting pot of really clever often contrarian/polemical developers who are kind of bound to clash at one point or another.

no they are not - but the bigger the stakes, the bigger the audience, the bigger the lever.. Faust comes to mind

Yes.