Dominus wrote on 2023-09-09, 22:23:
yeah, well, there was a reason for this, thus my very mild (IMO) critique. Flames have gone way down and I think the personal attacks have stopped and cleansed off the staging site which I do appreciate. Not sure if that helps to mend the wounds (perceived by me). OTOH the staging lead has been on #dosbox (IRC) for quite some time and things have always been civil.
Glad to hear that there is no more animosity between the Vogons folks and the Staging project! I realise this is the "DOSBox General" thread, but I'd like to take the opportunity to provide my perspective on the topic in a *single* comment here, as a new co-maintainer of the DOSBox Staging project who was 100% not involved with any of the past events 😀
I ended up contributing to the Staging project as an "independent party" about 2 years ago, simply because I wanted some extra features not present in any of the forks, and Staging appeared to be an active and modern fork with current development practices and standards (I've been a professional developer for 20+ years and those things are important for me). Moreover, Staging already supported some nice extra features over all other existing forks (including SVN), so it was the logical choice for me.
I wasn't aware of these past "conflicts" when I started contributing—I wasn't even aware that the Vogons forum even existed! I learned about the backstory much later when people mentioned that Dreamer eventually got banned on Vogons, etc.
I very much like the Vogons forum and the people here because after my Staging dev journey started, I got progressively more interested in retro-gaming, which eventually led to a closet full of old PC parts... we all know how that story goes 😎 The information one can find on any retro-PC related topics on this forum is second to none and I find the people here very helpful and knowledgeable, so I'm very much enjoying my stay here. Perusing the Vogons forum led me to add accurate, authentic Sound Blaster filters to Staging for all supported SB models, full Adlib Surround Module emulation so we can all enjoy the Dune soundtrack in its full glory, per mixer channel reverb and chorus that emulates what you can do on certain AWE32/AWE64 boards, and the next big-ticket sound related item I'm going to work on is full AWE32 emulation. Without all the info on this forum, I don't think I would've even gotten the inspiration to even think about adding these features, so thanks to all the great people here 😄
Personally, I never even had much contact with Dreamer in the first year or so, only recently, but then he disappeared again. He's a great guy and we got along well for that brief period. As I see it, it would be regrettable if any past conflict/drama would overshadow the relation between the current cast of Staging maintainers/contributors and the original DOSBox project / Vogons.
About attribution, all contributions are properly credited in Staging; so, for example, if we take a patch from SVN, it always appears in the Git history under the original author's name. Same for any other contribution from any other fork, project, and so on. The same goes for the license comments at the top of every single file; we always credit the original DOSBox Team in the individual files, and only remove that attribution if something has been significantly refactored and rewritten so it has very little connection to the original code anymore (like less than 10-20%). I was actually quite surprised by this when I started contributing—I never encountered another project where such a great importance was put on proper attribution and where it was done so systematically and methodically. I find that a good thing, personally.
If you check out our release notes, there is always a "thank you" message to the original DOSBox Team and we also mention which patches/fixes are originating from SVN. You can check out all past release notes here, it's all verifiable:
https://dosbox-staging.github.io/downloads/windows/
On our About page, there is also a "thank you" notice to the original team:
https://dosbox-staging.github.io/about/
From the top of the page:
DOSBox Staging is a modern continuation of DOSBox with advanced features and current development practices.
Then further down:
Relationship to DOSBox
DOSBox Staging is separate from and not supported by the SourceForge-hosted DOSBox project or its development team, the DOSBox Team.
We acknowledge and are thankful for the work shared by all DOSBox contributors.
All in all, if the relationship between the projects is now friendly, that's good, and I fully hope we can keep it so going forward 😄
DOS: Soyo SY-5TF, MMX 200, 128MB, S3 Virge DX, ESS 1868F, AWE32, QWave, S2, McFly, SC-55, MU80, MP32L
Win98: Gigabyte K8VM800M, Athlon64 3200+, 512MB, Matrox G400, SB Live
WinXP: Gigabyte P31-DS3L, C2D 2.33 GHz, 2GB, GT 430, Audigy 4