How to avoid being forked into oblivion by a more powerful contributor?
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Den
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Published on 2014-08-20T20:10:44Z
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2014/08/20
22:32 UTC
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As recently reported here:
Xamarin has forked Cocos2D-XNA, a 2D/3D game development framework, creating a cross-platform library that can be included in PCL projects.
However the founder of the project that was forked says:
The purpose of the MIT license is to unencumber your fair use. Not to encourage you to take software, rebrand it as your own, and then "take it in a new direction" as you say.
While not illegal, it is unethical.
It seems that the GitHub page of the new project doesn't even indicate that it's a fork in a typical GitHub manner, opting for an easily-removable History section instead (see bottom).
So my questions are:
- Was Xamarin's action and the way the action was done ethical or not?
- Is it possible to avoid such a situation if you are a single developer or a small unfunded group of developers?
I am hoping this could be either a wiki question or there will be some objective answers grounded on modern OSS ethics/philosophy.
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