Comment by JambalayaJimbo
5 months ago
Is everyone here just ignoring the fact that the 12 year maintainer of this project performed the re-write? Companies cannot do this with relative ease unless they hire these OSS maintainers
5 months ago
Is everyone here just ignoring the fact that the 12 year maintainer of this project performed the re-write? Companies cannot do this with relative ease unless they hire these OSS maintainers
I think that's one of the most important details here.
From a moral perspective Dan wanting to relicense the project carries much more weight give his many years of contribution.
From a practical perspective the reason the rewrite went so well (significant performance boost, virtually no duplicate code) speaks to his skill and experience with the domain.
It's also a cause of friction here, because the fact that he knows the codebase so well makes him less credible as a clean-room implementer - his own biological neural weights are deeply biased by what he's learned from that existing code.
He’s not claiming the rewrite is a clean room implementation. In fact he’s explicitly saying it is not:
> However, the purpose of clean-room methodology is to ensure the resulting code is not a derivative work of the original. It is a means to an end, not the end itself. In this case, I can demonstrate that the end result is the same — the new code is structurally independent of the old code — through direct measurement rather than process guarantees alone.
That's a good note, yeah. Dan isn't claiming a pure clean room approach here.