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> In May 2022, the MIT License of SIMH version 4 on GitHub was unilaterally modified by a contributor to make it non-free, by adding a clause that revokes the r

> In May 2022, the MIT License of SIMH version 4 on GitHub was unilaterally modified by a contributor to make it non-free, by adding a clause that revokes the right to use any subsequent revisions of the software containing their contributions if modifications that "influence the behaviour of the disk access activities" are made. That seems weirdly specific. Looking at the actual LICENCE.txt file: > Any use of this codebase that changes the code to influence the behavior of the disk access activities provided by sim_disk.c and scp.c is free to do that as long as anyone doing this is explicitly not licensed to any subsequent changes to any part of the codebase in the master branch of the git repository (https://github.com/simh/simh https://github.com/simh/simh) made by Mark Pizzolato after the LICENSE.txt was added to the master branch of repository. Changes that qualify for this restriction at least include: changing the behavior or default of SET AUTOSIZE/NOAUTOSIZE, or any code in scp.c and sim_disk.c or any simulator components that use the sim_disk routines. I'm guessing this Mark Pizzolato made some changes to the implementation of "disk access activities" that he deemed were important but which other people found controversial, and he wanted to make sure they stayed?

ziotom78 3y ago
I didn't know this project existed, but that controversy on the license made me curious, and I have had a look at the repository. I stumbled upon this discussion, which shows another controversial decision by the new maintainer regarding the way disk files are managed by the emulator: https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059 https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059
- eschaton 3y ago
  He’s not “the new maintainer,” he’s “one maintainer” but he decided he knew better than everyone else. Hence why the official SIMH repository is at open-simh.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    He's the overwhelming majority of contributions to the codebase for the last decade. What he did was toxic, but in fairness, there was out-of-band harassment coordinated towards him for nearly a year.
    - eschaton 3y ago
      There wasn’t “out-of-band harassment,” there were people calling out his toxicity and unilateral negative changes that he kept doubling down on. And no matter how many contributions he’s made, it’s always been Supnik’s project.
      - mlyle 3y ago
        When you rally people over Twitter to come to an issue on an open-source project, it's A) out of band, and B) being a jerk. > And no matter how many contributions he’s made, it’s always been Supnik’s project. Basically the overwhelming majority of all work for the last 15 years has been him.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
xvilka 3y ago
It just resulted in the open and official fork - OpenSIMH[1]. [1] https://opensimh.org/ https://opensimh.org/ [2] https://github.com/open-simh/simh https://github.com/open-simh/simh
EgoIncarnate 3y ago
It seems Mark Pizzolato was at the time the primary maintainer and recent contributor (by a large margin) (https://groups.io/g/simh/message/1501 https://groups.io/g/simh/message/1501). Mark made a change to how the virtual disk system worked that broke an esoteric use case (using dd to image multiple disk images to an SD, without an actual file system). The user didn't want to use a workaround (specifying the transfer size in the dd command), and proceeded to use twitter to get people to harass Mark. (https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/the-internet/toxicity-in-software-related-discussions.html https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/the-internet/toxicity...) Mark got sick of the harrasment and decided to take his toys and go home. Toxic user prompts toxic reaction by developer.
- userbinator 3y ago
  I'm sure glad I don't work with developers like that, because that complaint makes perfectly reasonable sense to me and I certainly wouldn't consider it "toxic". Expecting a raw disk image file to be the exact size of the virtual device is not at all an "esoteric use case". Being a prolific contributor doesn't mean you get to force your mistakes on others and cry about it when your decisions come back to bite you. See what Big Tech is doing to us for a great example of what this "feelings-driven design" crap has given us. Words to live by: "if everyone tells you that you're wrong... maybe you are."
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - EgoIncarnate 3y ago
    It sounds like there was a config option available to disable the signature addition to the image file ( https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-1086899270 https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-108689... ). I could see a benefits for having an embedded image signature for preservation and corruption detection issues. I don't think complaining about the design is toxic, but recruiting uninvolved people on twitter, and harassing out of band certainly is. Also reading the bug thread it seems the person with the issue wasn't the same as the one who instigated the harassment. (https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-1086752061 https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-108675...)
deleted 3y ago
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ziotom78 3y ago

I didn't know this project existed, but that controversy on the license made me curious, and I have had a look at the repository. I stumbled upon this discussion, which shows another controversial decision by the new maintainer regarding the way disk files are managed by the emulator: https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059 https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059

eschaton 3y ago
He’s not “the new maintainer,” he’s “one maintainer” but he decided he knew better than everyone else. Hence why the official SIMH repository is at open-simh.
- mlyle 3y ago
  He's the overwhelming majority of contributions to the codebase for the last decade. What he did was toxic, but in fairness, there was out-of-band harassment coordinated towards him for nearly a year.
  - eschaton 3y ago
    There wasn’t “out-of-band harassment,” there were people calling out his toxicity and unilateral negative changes that he kept doubling down on. And no matter how many contributions he’s made, it’s always been Supnik’s project.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      When you rally people over Twitter to come to an issue on an open-source project, it's A) out of band, and B) being a jerk. > And no matter how many contributions he’s made, it’s always been Supnik’s project. Basically the overwhelming majority of all work for the last 15 years has been him.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

xvilka 3y ago

It just resulted in the open and official fork - OpenSIMH[1]. [1] https://opensimh.org/ https://opensimh.org/ [2] https://github.com/open-simh/simh https://github.com/open-simh/simh

EgoIncarnate 3y ago

It seems Mark Pizzolato was at the time the primary maintainer and recent contributor (by a large margin) (https://groups.io/g/simh/message/1501 https://groups.io/g/simh/message/1501). Mark made a change to how the virtual disk system worked that broke an esoteric use case (using dd to image multiple disk images to an SD, without an actual file system). The user didn't want to use a workaround (specifying the transfer size in the dd command), and proceeded to use twitter to get people to harass Mark. (https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/the-internet/toxicity-in-software-related-discussions.html https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/the-internet/toxicity...) Mark got sick of the harrasment and decided to take his toys and go home. Toxic user prompts toxic reaction by developer.

userbinator 3y ago
I'm sure glad I don't work with developers like that, because that complaint makes perfectly reasonable sense to me and I certainly wouldn't consider it "toxic". Expecting a raw disk image file to be the exact size of the virtual device is not at all an "esoteric use case". Being a prolific contributor doesn't mean you get to force your mistakes on others and cry about it when your decisions come back to bite you. See what Big Tech is doing to us for a great example of what this "feelings-driven design" crap has given us. Words to live by: "if everyone tells you that you're wrong... maybe you are."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- EgoIncarnate 3y ago
  It sounds like there was a config option available to disable the signature addition to the image file ( https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-1086899270 https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-108689... ). I could see a benefits for having an embedded image signature for preservation and corruption detection issues. I don't think complaining about the design is toxic, but recruiting uninvolved people on twitter, and harassing out of band certainly is. Also reading the bug thread it seems the person with the issue wasn't the same as the one who instigated the harassment. (https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-1086752061 https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-108675...)

deleted 3y ago

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