[Rcpp-devel] [Rd] Terminology clarification (Re: GPL and R Community Policies (Rcpp)

Dirk Eddelbuettel edd at debian.org
Thu Dec 2 23:58:46 CET 2010


On 2 December 2010 at 17:23, Dominick Samperi wrote:
| OK, since you are so accomodating, then please remove all reference to
| my name from Rcpp as I do not want to be subject to arbitrary revisions of
| my status. I may not have the right to say how my prior work will be used,
| but I think I have the right to ask that my name not be used in the way
| it is used in the recent update.

As I pointed out, you change your mind on this every 12 months, limiting my
patience and willingness for these dances.  It has also been suggested by
other than attribution is clearer if you listed as the maintainer of the
2005/2006 code that we started from in 2008.
 
| On the "fork" question, in November of 2009 you were maintaining
| an old version of my software for your own purposes because I did

Well a glance at the changelog (either from the source, the SVN repo or via
the bottom of http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rcpp.changelog.html) clearly
shows that by November 2009 we were nine releases into it. There are a full
210 lines of changes including

2009-11-18  Dirk Eddelbuettel  <edd at debian.org>

        * DESCRIPTION: Add Dominick back into Authors per his new request
          reversing his requests to be removed from last December

As I stated, this was maintaining, enhancing, solidifying, ... a codebase I
and others used, using an API and code that we were free to use under GPL.  

You had released nothing from late 2006 to late 2009 -- and as I recall what
you released then (and withdrew weeks later) was not even compatible with
your own old API.  

But our Rcpp was -- that is called "maintaining" code.

| not have time to contribute updates to CRAN. The changes that
| you made were minimal (as a diff would show). GPL permits you

We beg to differ.

| to do this. Whether you call this a fork or not is a language issue.
| 
| In November of 2009 I released an update with many improvements
| including object mapping support that was missing from my old
| software and from the version that you were maintaining. I asked
| you to remove the version you were maintaining so there would
| be only one Rcpp library, and you refused, invited Romain to
| join the project, and added many of the features that I had just
| released. Thus the real "fork" occured in November 2009.

Nonsense -- No code, design, ideas, .... of your shortlived RcppTemplate are
in Rcpp.  

Romain and I repeatedly said so, and we will not let you paint an alternate
history.  

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com


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