This has quite amazing amounts of stop energy.
Please make it stop!
If people want to develop crazy things and explore new ideas, please let them. If you don’t agree, please shut up or prove the guy wrong using code.
I don’t care whether or not it’s crack. The very fact that somebody is exploring alternatives and putting his time in it, makes it already interesting for at least one person. If he wants others to enjoy his work, it’s his right to do so. It doesn’t mean that somebody has to agree. And Joe, it certainly doesn’t mean that somebody has to insult him.
If fact, you and Ross are in my opinion scaring away potential developers who’d like to join our free software community.
What really makes me wonder why the reaction was not like: “People see, alle the music players for GNOME are so crappy that people feel the urge to create new ones!”
I am listening to all my music using my GNOME laptop, currently using Rhythmbox. I already lost playlists to Rhythmbox ( bon apettit ), tried to be calm after Banshee crashed after hours trying to import my music library and invested quite some time to try to figure whether Muine is usable to handle a large MP3 collection ( all legal ;-) ). Of course I did this after I lost hours to SoundJuice which just produced unusable mp3s with lots of cracks without a warning ( while Grip just worked fine ).
I bet this developer was even more pissed than Ross or Joe where but HE did not have a way to ignore the situation while Ross could have easily done so. When to blame the developer of Listen it is surely because of not respecting copyright but of course not for developing software!
I agree with arne. The developer of Listen probably did not cannibalize other projects simply because he wanted to put his own name on it, but more likely saw something like AmaroK that actually attracts people to a platform instead of being just a suitable replacement for functionality in other platforms. Coding an entire music player on your own isn’t easy, as I’m sure all of you know, so borrowing code from other open source projects just makes sense to someone who wants to see their vision enacted but doesn’t have the community clout yet.
question: what are we, third graders that we must do all this touchy-feely, “we must not make comments” stuff?
philip: ross’ comment was a bit on the edge, but its his blog, and he has any rights to write that the player sucks; the other blog post from joe is the more relevant: the entire free software/open source thingie works because we have copyright and because we have peer pressure. the “author” of listen stole code, because it didn’t simply lift it and put it into his project: he also removed the copyright notices. I copy code from many projects (as far as the license enables me to do it safely) but I leave at least a note saying from where I took the code and who’s the author. if a big company did the same thing we would all be jumping and screaming around.
what strikes me the most is that, instead of integrating stuff by talking to the various projects and – at most – forking some code base, the guy just went lifting code, collating stuff like a frankenstein movie, and then releasing the resulting “monster” without even a mention of the other projects. and all these people say: “oh, the media player situation demands it” or: “oh, amarok is such a fine player that we need a poor man’s clone for gnome” – basically insulting every author of the other media players around, insulting an author that want his contribution to the f/oss community recognized as he well should, and justifying the copyright infringement for the sake of having their pretty little clone.
these are energy stoppers. If I was a developer of another media player I would simply cease all my work instantly, out of such blatant ingratitude.