Hi all,
>
We took on building the stand-alone .EXE functionality only once you had
made it clear that you were not interested in taking on this
commission, and over email in September 2022 asked us to work on it. In
no way have we wanted to take advantage or misrepresent you, and it
pains me that you seem to think that.
The fact that WMSE took this on is only awesome and I have supported that all along. At the only point in which I feeled misrepresented, WMSE concluded I had been and unpublished the blog post in question.
This just illustrates my point. A quick look at the progress report reveals that rather than collaborating and being transparent with the project WMSE moved all decision making and underlying research to its own spaces over at Phabricator. Since the pull request reached Pattypan WMSE hasn't worked on its implementation at all.
> We got feedback from you back in spring about our implementation but have not gotten any replies to our questions since then.
If someone decides to abandon work on a patch it will take months for someone else to pick it up, that's how open source works. All the unanswered questions are asking me if I have had the time to look at a solution on my own.
> To ensure it could still be of use to those who wish to use it (incl.
the GLAM that commissioned it) we therefore host it separately and take
on the task of manually syncing it to newer releases of Pattypan. In no
way should that be considered to entail a fork of Pattypan, but rather
just an independently maintained download version for some Windows users
(i.e. just a binary).
WMSE's "independently maintained download version" still points to Pattypan for support, it uses the same version-identifier as the official version, etc. Even though the project would have no ability to support this "version" given that it's "just a binary". No one involved in Pattypan was even informed.
WMSE shouldn't have done this in the first place, it's a well known no-no in open source, they should have either finished the work started or at least communicated a wish to find an alternative solution. Several solutions come to my mind directly.
Just like posting blog posts about maintainers' inabilities is abusive, bypassing community/open source processes is abusive too. I'm not sure what points WMSE is trying to score with these actions?
Albin