Hoi,
I already agreed that I haven't seen the code which is available today under GPL. We are in touch with Linterweb since more than a year (Emmanuel with Kiwix even longer) and it took us several months to get useless patches - at this time Okawix was NOT GPL and NOT available in source code (but yet published and being sold on DVD).
Concerning your other rants you seem not to have read or understood my mail.
openZIM does not prublish offline content and does not provide reader software except it's reference implementation.
It is perfectly okay for me and everyone else I know when they fork Kiwix to Okawix. Kiwix is not openZIM, though. So I can not speak for Kiwix and localisation is no matter to openZIM as well.
ZIM is a standard file format used by many offline readers and ongoing efforts. There is no sense in "forking" a standard. As I pointed out Linterweb is unable to come up with any reasons why the keep changing things and why they are "unable" to just use ZIM and the library which is already there. It would make their lives easier!
For the openZIM team I guess it is pretty irrelevant if Linterweb uses ZIM or not. I have pointed out that the openZIM team and Tommi tried to start a collaboration and where it went.
/Manuel
Am Donnerstag, 3. September 2009 09:19:42 schrieb Gerard Meijssen:
Hoi, You make accusations and they fall flat. You say that the Okawix software is not GPL and it is. You say that the software is proprietary and, because of a lack of communication with YOUR project you call them proprietary... I call it preposterous. When they want to fork, they have every right to do so. Given that by your own admission YOUR code has a file format that is not fixed but you ask people to conform to your standard ??? By the definitions of the GPL it is exactly your actions that make the software you champion proprietary!
Really, you should know better then spout FUD in this way. The sad thing is what you are saying is enough to land you in court because it looks to me like slander.
When I read your story, I find that you insist on other people doing as you say. You may have the best intentions but you cannot compel people in this way. They are a fork, they are GPL software, they care about internationalisation and their localisation is done at translatewiki.net. At that they are ahead of you.
In my opinion you owe the list an apology for your inacurate and inconsiderate accusations. Thanks, GerardM
2009/9/3 Manuel Schneider manuel.schneider@wikimedia.ch
Hoi Gerard,
it is indeed a huge improvement that finally the source code was made available. This has not yet came to my sight. So GPL violation does not count here.
Anyway, it took a long time to actually become free. When we were trying to work with Linterweb it took us months to get some patches of the code they took from us, and the patches were actually not usable.
Concerning proprietary format: Zeno was kind of proprietary, but at least it existed some documentation and DirectMedia was willing to answer questions. ZIM is completely open and freely documented, so if you don't like our implementation or you think that C++ is not the language of your choice - feel free and go ahead with your own implementation. As long as you follow the standard!
Of course the file format is not fixed until good right now, so if you have suggestions you could name them on the openZIM mailinglist or file a bug at the openZIM website.
What Linterweb did was just changing random thing without documentation and very bad communication towards the openZIM project team. So I do consider it as proprietary - as it is incompatible with both ZIM and Zeno and there is no willingnes to collaborate to fix this issue.
Both Tommi (the openZIM main developer who has also delivered his Zeno-related code to Linterweb) and Emmanuel (from whom they took Kiwix to make it Okawix) have a long story to tell about this. As well as I have, because I am being addressed regularly by Linterweb as they still try to get code and support, but never really get into the project by telling us what they really want and how we could integrate that into openZIM.
We had a Wikipedia Offline meeting in Buenos Aires and someone named Linterweb. Surprisingly for me they are also quite wellknown to the foundation and more surprisingly they have quite similar views as we have.
I would love to see them using ZIM in Okawix, even if it would require some changes if they feel we had to make it more usable for them (even though I see currently no reason why it was not perfectly usable right now). Of course we invited Linterweb to our first developers meeting and two people from them actually registered (one of them was Pascal Martin, the CEO) so we book rooms for them from our project's budget, but they never showed up. A side story though, but it is an excellent example how collaboration with Linterweb is going on.
Regards,
Manuel
Regards Manuel Schneider
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