Re: [hylafax-users] Fax confirmation: Umlauts (ä) broken

["Darren Nickerson" <darren.nickerson@xxxxxxxx>]

Max,

I'm not sure what that email exchange was originally about, of whether it 
was actually meant for public consumption, but frankly I'm glad it surfaced. 
I won't address the personal attack directly, since this is not about me. 
It's about something much larger.

In my opinion, the reason HylaFAX+ exists is twofold:

1. One person eventually became so arrogant that they could no longer 
participate in a community development process. Sure, that developer was a 
talented, important member of the hylafax.org development team who has 
improved the software in very substantial ways over the past years, but come 
on, to characterize yourself as the 'primary developer and supporter for 
years', and the work that's we're doing at hylafax.org as 'mostly in the 
wrong direction'? That's the height of arrogance.

2. That same person developed a consulting business around HylaFAX that 
meant that he needed more control over the development process than 
traditional open source development would allow. He added lots of 'special 
sauce' for his customers that was either slow to make it into hylafax.org 
releases or was, in some rare cases not seen as appropriate for inclusion 
into the mainline code base by a majority of his peers. It was difficult and 
frustrating to always have to maintain a separate set of patches, keep 
syncing them with hylafax.org releases etc, and far easier just to have his 
own version of HylaFAX that he could control completely without having to 
bother discussing/debating anything.

Obviously I'm not a fan of reason 1, but I can definitely understand reason 
2. Some of you may have heard of iFAX Solutions - yet another consulting 
business built around supporting HylaFAX. I work there, as you can probably 
tell from my email address. At iFAX, we also faced this challenge when 
dealing with customers who wanted X, Y and Z (and wanted it done pronto!) 
and we solved it in a different way. Instead of trying to control open 
source HylaFAX development, we created our own private software product that 
our customers can run if they choose to, and we started the numbering at 1.0 
to prevent confusion with the main open source HylaFAX at hylafax.org. We 
usually base our software on the latest open source releases, so we don't 
want to diverge too much from that code base. As a result, we contribute as 
much as possible back to the community - at least as much as people find 
useful and are willing to support. We actively contribute it - we don't just 
say 'you can take it if you want it and can get it to merge with current 
CVS', we formulate the work as patches, hang them on bugzilla or post them 
to the list, and we advocate for them as they are discussed. We don't talk 
about our own software on this mailing list, because this list is meant to 
be for open source HylaFAX from hylafax.org. We don't continually encourage 
people to 'upgrade' to it, and we certainly don't criticize the open source 
code base. Instead we pay several people to actively participate in 
development at hylafax.org.

It's clear from Lee's comments that despite all of his backpedaling and 
public statements about mending his ways, this was exactly what it appeared 
to be from the beginning - an attempt to hijack the development of HylaFAX 
into Lee-land, where he would be sure to always get his way and at the same 
time guarantee that his customers' work made it into the mainstream. I think 
most people agree, the only honorable thing to do would have been to fork 
cleanly and compete with hylafax.org instead of trying to steal the 
community through a combination of website cloning, PR campaigns and 
misdirection.

I'm extremely encouraged that on the whole, most of the participants in this 
community are honorable, decent and most importantly vigilant. Many of you 
will recall when Lee originally forked (although he insisted it was not a 
fork), he simply stole the entire hylafax.org website and launched it at 
Sourceforge. A lot of people objected to this, and as a result the 
Sourceforge site was redesigned with original content instead. Of course the 
software at sourceforge was still being called HylaFAX and was following a 
similar numbering scheme to the software from hylafax.org, and we had to 
endure the ensuing confusion on the mailing lists for months. I don't know 
how, but someone finally convinced Lee to change the name to HylaFAX+ and I 
think that went a long way in helping make it clear to everyone that this is 
different software. Of course we still have the versioning problem, where 
Lee refers to his software as an 'upgrade' all the time, and has numbered it 
5.x to illustrate how superior it is to what we distribute. And of course we 
all have to keep hearing about how development decisions that we make as a 
community, such as the addition of email templating, are wrong and DOOMED to 
fail, and how we'd all be better off running HylaFAX+ etc.

So is Lee really the only HylaFAX developer, and is hylafax.org doomed to a 
slow death due to all the development we're doing in the wrong direction? 
Hardly! We're still here, releasing software for the joy of it, while trying 
to continually improve HylaFAX for the benefit of all who use it.  In the 
recent few releases, development has benefited greatly from the efforts of 
the following people (apologies to anyone I have missed, this is from 
memory):

Claudiu Cristea
Patrice Fournier
Marcin Giedz
Andrea Nicolini
Giulio Orsero
Tim Rice
Giuseppe Sacco
Aidan Van Dyk

In addition, last year we completely revamped the hylafax.org website, 
gathering as much of old the fragmented documentation as we could, 
modernizing it and putting it into the HylaFAX Handbook, which continues to 
be improved thanks to contributions from various volunteers (more volunteers 
always welcome!!).

Finally, of course we keep an eye on Lee's HylaFAX+ development and pull in 
all of the no-brainer, obvious fixes (especially to the fax protocol) that 
we can, as quickly as possible. The rest of them are discussed and/or 
included as time allows, whenever someone takes an interest in a particular 
bugfix and/or feature.

The bottom line that's increasingly important for people to realize is that 
HylaFAX and HylaFAX+ (or whatever it will be called in the future) is 
different software, developed by different people using a different process. 
There's nothing wrong with having a choice, I just would like to make sure 
people are aware they're choosing, instead of just thinking it's an 
'upgrade'.

Finally, Max if you have an issue you'd like to report with German language 
support in 4.3.1 or 4.3.2beta2 please do let us know so that we can fix it 
before 4.3.2 becomes final in the coming days/weeks.

-Darren



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