I don't fully understand what you are saying, but I think you make the point that Gambit will be put out that his work (you) has been modded (your improved clone), and that people (your parents/partner) are appreciating the benefit (I dunno, better grammar?). The inference being that 0.6 was not up to scratch.

There is a simple answer to this dilema: don't release it open source.

Miriam has released the source to 0.6.2. Gambit may have been saved some man hours if he chooses to use Miriam's work, freeing him up to create other stuff that surpasses 0.6.2. And so it goes on.

I don't pretend to understand the licensing of these things - but from what has been said earlier Miriam is well within his rights to do what he did. I understand the concerns toward Gambit - he is a well-respected member of this community - but as far as I am concerned Miriam has improved Mr QuestionMan, and I, and possibly others, am benefitting from that.

If 0.7 has subfolder scanning and further improvements I'll no doubt switch back. I'm a fickle end-user with no concern about open source, LGPL, or usual development cycles. The competition is good for me.

Just to clarify on Trademark law (off the top of my head):

A trademark does not have to be registered in any country for it to take effect, BUT you have to indicate somewhere that is it your trademark (such as TM after it).

There is nothing illegal about using another companies trademark (as long as it is not product counterfitting), it is up to that company to enforce it's own trademark with it's own money in the courts. If a company does not enforce a trademark (ie lets its usage go, even once, because a) they cannot be bothered b) they have no money) then that trademark item will enter the public domain.

Right, maybe the most simple answer is that we don't really need an answer as we take everything to our needs.

Of course improved apps give us a benefit, therefore we label them as improved - and the code is somewhat open, there is room for improvements and there are people who are willing spending some time on improving - all this make the program better and noone will object to this as there is a benefit at your side.

All I dislike is not the work Miriam finally did but the way how he presents his additions in Gambit's work, so it's not the final result, that's undoubtable good (from a technical and also useful point of view), but how it is presented.

There are people who sh*t on thoughts like that and there are people who appreciate a regardful handling - no no, don't adhere on words

hmm, does somebody know why I am writing all this stuff, there is undoubtable more important work to do... is it the lost riddle of human being ?

Nonsense. Think about Gogo, aoTuV, eMule mods... branches are everywhere. And they are common practice whenever a)the developer isn't willing to implement the features you want (eMule) or b) the developer stopped developing or is developing at a painfully slow pace (aoTuV)



Wouldn't work, as Gambit himself said Miriam is implementing features he wouldn't have implemented.



The Mandrake guys actually did so. They created a forked kernel with USB that would break compatibility with other kernels. The bru-ha-ha in the Linux community was so huge that they eventually gave up. But at least they tried.



Forking a kernel isn't indeed a good idea, since it potentially breaks compatibility with countless programs that run on it. But forking stuff like Vorbis and Lame (as long as decoder compatibility is retained) and Mr QuestionMan is harmless.



Meh.



Well, if you ever plan to enforce it (E.G, in the case some domain thief stealed your URL), then you must have it registered, or the courts won't give you a damn. See the recent case of Apple vs. itunes.co.uk.

Even if it is registered, the courts will only take it off you if a person visiting your robbed domain name would confuse it with the real thing (ie the content is the in the same field and your site is commercial) You could have a non-commercial windows.com and Microsoft are not entiled to take it, if you try to sell it to Microsoft then you are trying to sell them their tradename and it will go to MS.

I could sell 'itunes swimming trunks' and Apple shouldn't have any recourse, they might try in courts - as often is the case bigger bucks can win, even if they shouldn't. That is why you have Jaguar cars and Apple Jaguar OS, an average person should not confuse the two so there is no problem.

Apple (incidently a trademark of Apple records) were fine until they released a computer with audio features.

Ah, very interesting. I stand corrected.

Good examples. However, in this case I don't think that the difference between the two developers was enough to motivate a fork. This is, of course, Miriam's decision and Gambit has no right to step him, however I don't believe it was The Right Thing.

It's not really harmless - forking over such a minor issue makes both branches of the project less useful. It means that twice as much work is needed to maintain the project and ensure it keeps up with developments in audio technology and to add new features.

I think that what roberto meant was that LAME, Vorbis, Mr Questionman etc. etc. are much less important than Linux. The impact of these apps outside specific communities is negligible... That's not the case with Linux.

Bear in mind that I mean no offense to any developer with this comment.



edit: grammar

Right. And not only that. Think about it: branches in the kernel could lead to uncompatibility, instability, and so on. That would be a very, very serious issue, since its stability is one of Linux' biggest selling points.

Now, even if branches to MrQ, Lame and Vorbis lead to instability, it'll just be a matter of closing the program and waiting for the new version that will hopefully fix it.

Anyway, that's just my point about the Linux Kernel not being a good example. My opinion in the current enchilada is that Miriam didn't take the best decisions when releasing his branch, but he has all the rights to release it and keep developing it anyway, with Gambit's approval or not.

"It's not really harmless - forking over such a minor issue makes both branches of the project less useful"

I don't understand this comment. The application got more useful to a number of people after it was 'forked'. One of the functions was not even planed to be added (ever?).
Ie. there is already a positive outcome here and it's only been forked for a few days !. I'm not saying that this is any indicator of the future outcome/development activity on this fork, but it definitely is a change for the better (for many people).

I'm not using the application at all (os x user), but I find it strange that people can take this development as something negative.

The only thing that IMO was handeled a bit.... rough ... , was the choice of name and lack of communication with original developer, but this was corrected very quickly and fork'er even appologized for the trouble.

Please don't make this into a bigger issue than it really is.

This is all of course just my opinion on the situation, heh.

yes I'm totally sure...I've tested it. Mr. Question Man does something like:

but it should be:

the difference between these 2 methods it's quite big...~5kbps

No, actually Mr QuestionMan does something like:
Average Bitrate = DirectorySize * 8 / (DirectoryDuration * 1000)
which is correct IMO.
Note that for audio encoding, 1 kbit = 1000 bits and not 1024.

I agree.
Actually, there is no problem.
Those who prefer Gambit's version, use that version, those who prefer my version, use my version. The difference between the two are relatively small, and, after all, it's a matter of taste in chosing one over another.
I encourage you to use the version you think suits you best.
From the Gambit's point of view: as Synthetic Soul (thanks for your support) said before, my "branch" could have saved him some minutes of work, if he chooses to implement some things I did. If not, there is no problem, actually it's HIS program. I made several modifications and I released it in every possible way, setup, zip + source, so everybody can benefit and, more over, potentially improve the program further.
From my point of view: firstly, I want to thank you for the BIG interest in Mr QuestionMan ME, I really didn't expected at first such a "shock wave". I'm very glad to see there are many enthusiastic guys here that appreciate my work. My work is dedicated to you.

@ all: If you like my "mod", use it, if not, don't or use Gambit's original version.
There is place for everybody.

Take care!

Your mod is fine. Even more fine now that it's labeled as a mod Forks are fine as long as they don't get retarded (like eMule as Roberto has mentioned in the past).

I actually like how I have subdirectory scanning now. Something I've been wanting for a while

Don't worry about that youthful enthusiasm stuff. I'm 21 as well.

thank you Miriam. much better to scan subfolders

(oh and admin when will i use my warn levels.. its been aggggesss now)

wait a minute...what does that have to do with audio encoding? Also, I thought that 8 kilobits = 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes...but according to you 8 kilobits = 8000 bits = 1000 bytes...

oops....
!Edited

Unicode people!!! Unicode

I absolutely love this program but I have one thing that would be completely awesome for me that's not currently there. The ability to export the scan info into an external file would be very nice.

Not that I'm ungrateful for what I've been given

I kinda agree that MrQ gives an impression of a big joke with additional ability to provide info about audio files. An eastern egg in the program is always a nice thing, but in MrQ there's too much "humor" IMO. One could think that informations it provides are a joke too. I'm not impairing the effort that was put in the serious part of this program, I just hope that in the next version's about box I won't see one of these pictures (don't look if you're eating ATM).

I think it's more about free stuff - if they see GPL they're happy because they won't have to download it via eMule
Did anyone notice that all the GPL, open-source, community-driven things, P2P sharing, is what communism is all about? I'm not saying if it's good or bad, just state the fact to think about

==> I am NOT a communist <==

I may like Stallman's point of view on patents,
... but I don't like StalineMan's point of view on politics ... AT ALL

... many GPL-Zealot are just democrats ... not communists ...

Agreed.

If you download Open Source the commies will come get you? I'm not even going to touch that.

Yeah, right.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/05/bill_..._free_cult.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/06/creative_commies.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/06/more_..._creative_.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/10/creat...ommies_mor.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/25/maxim...directors_.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/11/get_a...tive_commi.html

Nothing, specifically.


One byte is still eight bits - it's the decimal kilo verses binary kilo that's the issue.

Generally, most figures you see use the decimal kilo, so 1kb = 1000 bits, and 1kB = 1000 bytes. More so with bits.

1kb = 1000 bits, 1Kb = 1024 bits. But this standard isn't even recognised by everyone, so everybody just mixes them up anyway. We're supposed to be using kibibyte (KiB) for 1024 bytes now.

Some info taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobytes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

back to topic: it never hurts to first 'submit' a patch prior to releasing it, but i guess that's all understood and settled now.
i'm only hoping one day there'll be a linux port of mrq, or at least one version that runs under wine.
a command line utility would be a giant advance in that direction. and please remember that non-gpl stuff won't be included as a part of any official debian distributions, and that would be a hell of an honor, wouldn't it?

would be all i need, but then again, i'm just a piece of blah w/o practical knowledge. please consider this as a feature request.

It will be done in next version of Mr QuestionMan ME.



See above.

Thank you for your suggestions. Any ideas that may improve Mr QuestionMan ME are welcomed.

It's handy that Mr QuestionMan ME remembers the last folder - but how about a favourite folders list? So you could easily jump (back) to your root music folder and other core locations.

Not hugely useful, but possibly so.

Edit: Also, there is a flaw (IMO) with both Mr QuestionMan and Mr QuestionMan ME regarding the window size saving.

If I maximise the window and exit the next time I open the app the window's restore size is the same size as my desktop (same as maximise size). I hate it when you have to keep resizing windows from a maximised size. I have a few apps that fall down like this.

The size of the restore window size should be stored in local variables, and recorded to INI when closing - not the actual/current form size.

If you don't understand what I mean resize either app to a nice size and exit. Start up and the window is as you left it. Now maximise the window and exit. Start up and the window is full size. Hit maximise and there is no visible change. Your restore size settings have effectively been lost.

Yes, I'm a pedant.

I'd be nice if you could save the scan level integer. Every time I start the app. I have to up it one level. Just a bit annoying, nothing serious.

Greetings!

Today I started working on Mr QuestionMan 0.6.3 ME.
It's rolling on just nicely.
Keep in mind that I'll take into consideration any suggestion been made until its release (and thus - *possible*, implement it).

Cheers!

good news I really like your branch a lot...I guess EncSpot should give some inspiration . Being able to display the LAME Tag would be nice...as well as a better identification method for non-lame files...and graphs would cool too.

Icons are open source now?

They were granted to ONE person. And Miriam is NOT the person.

Violator...

f1losof:

What are you trying to learn me with your Wikipedia link ? Marxism ? ... Thks a lot
I was just pointing that the communism utopy died in Staline's gulags for me ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

even if Stallman looks more like Marx (specially with his huge beard ) I coudn't resist to play on words with Stall(ine)man ...

... sorry if it was not of the best taste

Okay there are some things I need to get off my chest.

First of all, what Miriam did might be okay in respect to the LGPL, but from an ethical/personal point of view, I feel disrespected and I'm very upset. He forked my application just a few hours after my official release, over an added feature that is a matter of a couple of coding minutes. I could understand that, if the development of the application was dead or the changes were significant. He made no effort to contact me prior to his release. Matter of fact, he STILL hasn't contacted me, it's obvious he has no intention to work with me and his only interest lies in his 15 minutes of fame. The situation feels a bit like I'm driving my car, stop at the lights, somebody throws me out of my car and I'm left there standing like "wtf?".

But that's open source to me, isn't it? Well, to be honest, this is not how I imagine open source to work and I'm starting to loose my belief in it. Miriam at least did respect the license and the issue is more a personal one because I feel like I was disrespected on a personal level.
But there are people that don't respect the licenses no matter what. And I see it every day. It's frustrating to see people use somebody's code. Take what they want, build upon that, improve what they need and never make a contribution back. It's even more frustrating to see people use open source code in shareware and commercial applications.

Anyway, what happened can't be changed now. I'm gonna take a step back and let Miriam run with it for a while and see what he comes up with. I've got enough other things to do, I'm not gonna waste any more time with this for now.

And to the people that don't like the humour in the application: If you don't like it, don't use it. It's that simple. Humour is one of the most important things in life. A humourless world is a world I don't want to live in.

Oh, and Jojo, please get informed before you post something. You seem to be talking about a lot of stuff you have no clue about (and not just in this thread). You know what they say: "It's better to keep the mouth shut and being suspected for being an idiot than open the mouth and remove every doubt..." But this seems to apply to more and more people on HA recently...

Thanks to everybody that shows support and respect to me. I REALLY appreciate it a lot. It's pretty much the only thing freeware authors get back for their efforts and time and it's what keeps them going. Thanks.

Gambit

Gambit I understand and share your point of view, Miriam is making too much "show" for what he did..

I liked the humour in Mr QuestionMan 0.6 , humour is indeed necessary.

I undertand Gambits position, but also sympathice with Miriam's newbie enthusiasm ... sad you 2 couldn't talk about it.

@gambit:
I'd propose to take a break from the whole thing and distract yourself with other thoughts. Currently, you're (understandable) a bit hot-headed and may make spontaneus decisions which you may later regret. After a while, you may realise that the whole thing - besides of the rudeness and disrespect-issue - isn't such a big deal and that neither miriam nor open-source is currently being a threat which may hijack your project. As long as credits are given and miriam respects the licence, things can only improve for both of you, because... don't forget that this can also result in back-and-forth porting of your version and the fork - both of you can freely take from each other. And _if_ miriam would do too many unethical things, then lets say that fame and shame are as close to each other as love and hate - especially at a place like ha.org. So, take a break and cool down, and then you may recognize that as long as the licence is respected, the situation actually isn't as bad as it seems to you right now.

@miriam:
It would be quite fair if you use your own thread for discussion and announcements of your own fork, and only use this thread to discuss gambits version and to coordinate stuff between your fork and gambits version.
_____

"Don't shoot the messenger"

- Lyx

similarly, i see both sides...

its a great, and much needed program gambit. first of all, thank you. thanks to both of you coders really. you are both very talented. i have loads of respect for both of you. nevertheless, miriam should have talked to gambit before he did this, not out of legality, but out of respect, but keep in mind everyone, that (at least i believe) miriam's intentions were pure. he did not intend on being rude... it appears that he was just trying to be helpful, and that he was... the whole situation appears kind of unfortunate, but when you look at the big picture, a great product was produced, and i dont care who's edition i have, i have great respect for both of you.

I agree that Miriam is not wrong in a legal point of view, but just an email saying "Gambit, I have an idea" after the release could have avoided all this mess.

What it's done, it's done. It cant be changed. Next time, just e-mail the original programmer saying what you're going to do. That cant be harmful, can it?

AAC/MP4/M4A support would be nice, whether done by Miriam OR Gambit.

I am really, really, really sad about the situation too ...

Gambit's work rocks ...
Burrrn (+Burnatonce) has replaced Nero for me &
MrQuestionMan (+ ME recursive scan) has replaced VorbisExtension for me ...

so when it comes to sweet little audio toolz he is one of my favorite coder ...
he was even more when I saw he started officially using LGPL ...

I would have liked Madah to officially release Frontah as GPL too ... instead of ... happyware ... LOL ... maybe there would have been an evil Miriam-like apprentice coder to keep it alive ...

I LIKE Madah & Gambit's Humour !

If what happened
- takes Gambit away from free software
- takes Gambit away from coding at all ...

I am very angry at Miriam !!!
I don't think you're so evil as I don't think you even wanted what's happening ...
But you can't come & say "hello, I added 3 lines of codes, I am the boss now"
Even if you didn't said it ... it was written between the lines ...

This is unwritten coding-etiquette violation ...

Where would Vorbis be now if Garf's tunings would have angered Monty ...
... nowhere ...

The difference is that Monty is a "linux native coder" ... so Garf could have done whatever he wanted with the code ... "native linux dev" are deeply convince that the GNU way is the right way ... so they don't care for their code as they know their soft is not their propriety ... their soft belongs to the community & they don't care much about fame ...

Gambit is a "windows native coder", obviously his soft is like his child to him ... that's not the GNU way of thinking ...

You both made error ...
Gambit under-estimated the LGPL
Miriam over-estimated Gambit's trust in LGPL, thinking he wouldn't care ...

to my experience ... there is a clash between what GPL means to linux native people : freedoom ... & what GPL means to windows native people: freeness ...

as a native windows coder Gambit misstaken free software with freeware ...
here is the result ...

you're both wrong, but for me, as the last new comer, Miriam you must take your pride away & make the first step toward Gambit ...

if you don't you'd better code us a kick ass next MrQM ME Fork ...
cauz otherwise we'll recall you as the INFAMOUS guy who killed MrQM !!!

Quote Gambit:
"The situation feels a bit like I'm driving my car, stop at the lights, somebody throws me out of my car and I'm left there standing like "wtf?" "

big misstake ... with LGPL you're in the public transport ...

Mr QM already supports AAC. only the MP4 container makes him choke.
as stated by Gambit a few times already, he most probably won't implent support for MP4, so it may be up to Miriam or sb else.

The icons are part of the resources used in that program. Thanks to the GNU licenses virotic behaviour, they must be under the LGPL. The same applies to Mr QuestionMan's picture in the about box.

If Gambit is the owner of the copyright in those graphics, he automatically licensed them under the LGPL when he released the sources under that license. If he isn't the owner, and has no rights to redistribute them ("forward the grant"), then he is the one violating the LGPL, not Miriam


What this thread badly needs are large quantities of Midol. Oh, and people that have some clue on licensing.

WavPack 4 files informations are now correct (I mean PROFILE information). Many thanks
I've noticed than 'extra' optimizations are not reported by MQM (they are present in WavPack header): was it intended?

Another thing: MQM supports now several multichannel format, but correct me if I'm wrong, there's no column to indicate the number of channels (might be interesting, for AC3 files, or some lossless mono).

i think there are 2 diferent things here:

1) legally/licensing wise
2) morally/politelly wise

1) legally/licensing wise, Miram was perfect, (or more likelly, almost perfect, as i don't know if using the same name as gambit's is leegal): she used the LGPL license rights.

2) morally/politelly wise, Miriam was totally wrong, as said, releasing a "major new version", of a just released tool, on the same topic as the original author, without even talking to him first, was totally unacceptable, even if miram's unexperience could somehow forgibe her a little.

Also, IMHO, i think nowadays "legally", is diferente than "morally", when it shouldn't be, as what is morall is what should rule the world, but lawyers got very smart, and now they rule the world (disclaimer: at 65 years old, my father just got a lawyer degree, and i have various lawyer friends). Laws should be used to enforce moralitty, but nowadyas, laws are used to make money (patents, etc), without any moral. My 2 cents.

I never said that. I just said that mp4 support is a bit more complicated, because there is no documentation available. You have to hack it together from available C++ code and by reverse engineering. Actually, to jarsonic a bit from behind the scenes, somebody (not me, my mp4 support in Burrrn is eh... very hackish ) already did write proper support for mp4 in Delphi, but it isn't released exactly because of no trust in open source.

Proper "forking" of open-source and remerging with the base in action:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=31664

As others already said: the licence is not the problem, but the handling. However, you cannot have freedom and flexibility without responsibility. Obviously, not everyone is gonna act in a responsible manner. Still, responsibility is not something which can be enforced with laws - the world is full of it yet still, that didn't make humans more responsible - more like the opposite.

edit: what you do with laws, is remove the need for responsibility - but not create responsible behaviour. The fact that most of the world is overflooded with laws - and therefore doesn't need responsible behaviour - is the reason for your current problems with MrQuestionman

- Lyx

Greetings Gambit!
Actually, I'm really sorry about the situation created, and I wanted to publicly express my appologies to you.
As I've stated in this topic, I prefered coding in the last days and, unfortunately, I neglected somehow team cooperation.
I admit, from an ethical point of view, it were corectly if I had write to you from the first place about my intentions before I post any form of mod of your software.
I really respect your work, you've done a wonderful job with Mr QuestionMan and we all really need you keep going on improve it.
These were all my intentions - to improve your software. I didn't release Mr QuestionMan ME just to obtain a 7 days momentum or something like this, it would be absolutely ridiculous. I released Mr QuestionMan ME and I've kept on improving it just to try to take - IMO - Mr QuestionMan a step further.
All started when I saw some people wanting recursive scanning -- and, seeing that it's written in Delphi I said - why not? Let's do it.
So, I've had from the start in the head the idea of making something to help SOME people. I said before, there is place for anybody, I frankly thing you don't have to be upset on the release of Mr QuestionMan ME. Really, this isn't competition, there are 2 versions of the same software. I think for the future that the improvement on a version will be good for the another, and vice-versa (since they are both include the source code). Actually, may be even more Delphi programmers here that may take a look on the code and help things go further.
It's a win-win situation, that's how I see the all "picture".
@OggZealot: I'm really not feeling like "wow, I added 3 lines of codes, I am the boss now". It's simply stupid. I acknowledge Gambit as the real developer of this project.
I call myself a guy that made some contribution to this project, and nothing more.
I just wanted to help, that's all.

Gambit, keep up the good work.
We need you.

Please accept my appologies.

Friendly,
Vlad.

I'm sorry to hear this. I'm still using 0.6 and was going to wait for your next release.

ah. I though that this post meant the above. sorry if I misunderstood anything