The second release candidate for Ion3 has been released. “This is the second ‘rc’ release, and contains primarily bug fixes and other minor improvements.” Get it from the download page.
The second release candidate for Ion3 has been released. “This is the second ‘rc’ release, and contains primarily bug fixes and other minor improvements.” Get it from the download page.
Ion author says he is fed up with free software community, objects to patched Ion versions being called Ion and trying to prevent such naming by threatening to use his trademark. Says he is going closed source after Ion3 and is abandoning Gnu/Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_window_manager
http://archlinux.org/pipermail/tur-users/2007-April/004644.html
Snap! if he really feels that way why not just scrap the whole thing right now. why even bothing any patches and so on.
While I have no idea what he has been through, he doesnt seem to be taking it very well. Its a shame to since i rather like Ion3
A wee bit bitter, aint we? (the author of Ion)
I like that dude for one reason: he hates XFT/fontconfig just like me 😉
Just kidding. Honestly, that guy is just obsessed by the name Ion(3). He’s a bit power-hungry too. Maybe he has a big developer ego and doesn’t want other people to “ruin” his work. Seriously, he’s hard to follow!
What’s really funny about it is that, if you go to his blog, you will find a number of rants against any kind of property rights, including statements that he does not respect the copyright of others. But when it comes to his own work…
It really is a shame though. Ion3 is certainly the best window manager I have ever used. I find it easier to handle a lot of windows in Ion than in the dynamic tiling wms (wmii/dwm etc.), and it certainly has the traditional WIMP-style wms beat, hands down.
I hope someone forks it and continues development when the original author stops.
sweet, an asshole developer.
thats a new one! I haven’t know /any/ asshole developers!
Ha ha.
Just ignore him, take latest opensource version and continue with name gIon for example.. that simple. If he’s right, there won’t be any such. If he’s wrong there will be. It’s that simple with opensource. The right guy wins.
“I would contend that there is no trademark violation, as permission for minor modifications to the source of Ion3 is implied by distributing the source.”
I thought it was understood that if you modify someone’s GPL’ed source, you either a) submit it back to the original author for acceptance b) fork the code or c) keep it for private/internal use. In this respect, Tuomo’s anger seems justified. It’s a pity that he feels he needs to lash out when the solution is simple. Politely ask your offender to rename their project. I would also think he has a case for GPL violation, but as I said earlier, I thought respect was understood.
Respect the author, respect the code.
Full disclosure: I’m a fan of Ion3.
Apparently you do not understand software freedom in general or the GPL in particular. Freedom means not having to ask the author’s permission.
That’s funny. No offense, but it seems that _you_ are the one who doesn’t understand “software freedom” or the GPL. Some of the “freedoms” in the GPL require certain responsibilities from those modifying the code (emphasis is mine):
“Also, for each author’s protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors’ reputations.”
The author of the hacked version of Ion3 was clearly acting irresponsibly by failing to distinguish his version from the original. This would also seem to qualify as a violation of the GPL, but I’m not a lawyer.
That text is in the preamble of the (L)GPL. The actual license terms only state
“b) You must cause the files modified to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.”
Therefore, the (L)GPL can be interpreted to be only concerned about the changes being apparent when people receive the source code and inspect it.
Edited 2007-06-10 09:31
Thanks, having limited familiarity with the LGPL, that really helps clear things up for me. Now, when I read the following, it makes a lot more sense:
“I would contend that there is no trademark violation, as permission for minor modifications to the source of Ion3 is implied by distributing the source.”
And if what someone claimed here is true, that the hacked version was basically distributed, modified, Ion3 code with instructions to compile, then I would agree that they are within the terms of the original license. Even so, I still respect Tuomov for his efforts with Ion3 and wish him all the best. No sense in getting all bitter and bent out over the incident.
I don’t blame him for being mad about the incorrect use of the product name. Someone changed a core chunk of ion3, then called the package ion3 and RENAMED THE ORIGINAL as something else.
That’s just wrong. Everyone knows that you don’t name your forked, largely modified code as the orignal, and rename the original code (except perhaps in the case of the mozilla project
… It should have been called something else. The ion3 author even said he could USE the ion3 name in it, but to differentiate it somehow…
except it wasn’t a fork, it was a patch.
And it wasn’t even a patched version, it was a PKGBUILD, which is just a set of instructions that tells makepkg how to build a program.
It was freaking instructions to patch Ion3. And it was in the AUR (which states it’s unsupported), and listed as unsupported on top of that, and only shows up if you search for it from the AUR website.
If you actually typed pacman -S ion3 you got an up to date unpatched version of ion3 from the official repos.
But wasn’t the patch to make it work with a different font engine or renderer? Did I misread?
But the PKGBUILD name was misleading. The one that LOOKED like the standard ION3 build was NOT. The one that was the standard ION3 build was renamed to something else.
I believe that was his beef and I don’t think he was wrong to be a little bit irritated with it. I wouldn’t have gone as far as he did, but I mean, I might have gotten my hackles up a bit too.
I had hoped to try it but if it is going into non-free in Debian…well…I dont do non-free.
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=14731
I was a longtime ion3 user, but after he stated that after ion3, there won’t be another version I switched to wmii, and am very happy with it.
Now I can’t stand the purely static window managment model of ion3.
The author is a retard, he’s acting like an asshole, and there are much better products out there.
Let’s move on.
haha, that dude is seriously weird.
well, i suppose its good SOMEONE still uses those old bitmap fonts