Probably be gone when you get there

http://www.etomite.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=4740

I posted at Etomite in response to some crap Dean posted when someone asked about MODx on their website and then proceeded to close the topic.

Here is the original post for reference:

In response to http://www.etomite.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=4735&hl=

That was a beautiful attempt at complete censorship of the facts Dean. As a member of the censored CMS dev team, and originally a devoted Etomite follower willing to contribute all that have to the dare-I-not-mention system. However, as a user of the original mods posted here and then deleted without warning by the founders of this community in response to GPL rantings by other idiots that had nothing to do with the people putting in the hard work on those mods, I was not about to give up all the additional features I came to enjoy and like in the mods because of this. So we started censored project name here.

I can tell you that Dean’s open discussion on the subject (nice how you spill out some poop and close the topic) is not a fair comparison at all, and the fact that Eto continues to censor our project, in conjunction with the fact that after a year we have an active community 4x the size of Etomite’s. Must be the great leadership of this community that actively engages in denial of the facts and loves to blame [Etomite Fork] (oops) for all the things that they’ve done wrong.

I’m sure this message (and my user account) won’t last long after I do post it, so not sure why I’m writing it. Blah blah blah...

Cheers guys, and enjoy your community of openness and sharing and all that you have here...

and added this as a reply shortly after

BTW, we’d be glad to give a fair comparison of the two systems at the do-not-cirvument word filter CMS as we’re known here...despite our issue with the openness of this community towards ours

The rest of the thread before Ralph closed it:

Etomite _ Etomite Discussion _ How About A Little Fairer Comparison?

Posted by: mikef Today, 02:01 PM
QUOTE(opengeek @ Apr 8 2006, 10:08 PM)
Cheers guys, and enjoy your community of openness and sharing and all that you have here...



From the community that is happy to take the work done on snippets by users here, copy the whole of a large snippet, and give next to nothing back from the enhancements they’ve made. And don’t even have the courtesy to tell the authors here that they’ve taken and exteded their work, so that we can have a look and see if we might want to port it back ...

There is clearly some bad blood between the two sides, that predates my involvement here (I’ve not been here all that long) but it seems to me its not as one-sided as you want to make out.


Posted by: opengeek Today, 02:09 PM
QUOTE(mikef @ Apr 8 2006, 05:01 PM)
From the community that is happy to take the work done on snippets by users here, copy the whole of a large snippet, and give next to nothing back from the enhancements they’ve made. And don’t even have the courtesy to tell the authors here that they’ve taken and exteded their work, so that we can have a look and see if we might want to port it back ...

There is clearly some bad blood between the two sides, that predates my involvement here (I’ve not been here all that long) but it seems to me its not as one-sided as you want to make out.



Sorry, I agree, community is wonderful here...it’s the leadership and practices engaged in by the leadership here that I am at odds with here. I still recommend Etomite where proper for a client of mine, and I have nothing but disgust for the slanderous treatment here when people ask about how Etomite compares with [Etomite Fork]. Couldn’t be that horrible, considering it comes from the code base Alex Butters originally wrote, which we, contrary to what is posted here, hold in very high regard and utmost respect. His CMS design is original and fresh and making things possible he probably never dreamed of...

No offense to anyone in this community, and forgive me for my ravings -- this continued censorship and poor sportsmanship just really p**ses me off so to speak. (<-- self censorship, just so no one is confused -- sigh)

Cheers

Posted by: mikef Today, 02:20 PM
nicely avoiding any mention of taking snippets authored here, with minimal acknowledgement and little attempt to return anything ...

Posted by: opengeek Today, 04:22 PM
QUOTE(mikef @ Apr 8 2006, 05:20 PM)
nicely avoiding any mention of taking snippets authored here, with minimal acknowledgement and little attempt to return anything ...



Hmmm, where I come from, other developers modeling code after your own in the open source world is the best acknowledgement and compliment anyone can give you, but you can take up whatever licensing issues you have with the individuals that authored the snippets you are referring to. If you don’t want to open source your code or have replicas be made of it, I suggest licensing and delivering it in some encrypted format so no one can access it’s secrets.

I appreciate your defensive stance as I am verbally attacking the actions of your stict community leadership, and hoping in some way that they will understand that open source is about sharing ideas, contributions, and improving code. Not about competition and censorship. But, alas, I feel it’s too late for Eto, and perhaps all I’m really trying to do is get my account deleted...I don’t know anymore, but it just made me mad and I had to respond to those ludicrous statements made in the thread to the person who asked about {censored-CRUD would be here}.

Regardless, my point: be a little more open, consider community contributions a little more, and accept the fact that you need a community with diverse ideas (even some conflict) to create a truly great product. Or don’t and repeatedly shoot yourself in the foot. That’s kind of fun to watch too.

Posted by: Ralph (rad14701) Today, 04:53 PM
Please allow me to state my stance, for the record, on this ongoing subject - and then exercise my moderation priviledges to close this topic once and for all... I’ve heard enough...!!!

FACT: The fork of Etomite in question was the reason why Alex Butter finally got fed up enough to leave - period...!!! We owe this fork nothing at all in light of this sad and unfortunate event...

FACT: The fork in question is filtered as a stipulation of Alex Butter when Dean and I were made the legitimate stewards of the Etomite CMS Project and with respect to his wishes the fork will remain filtered...

FACT: I have even gone so far as to share code and other informamtion with the forked project, through its members, on more than several ocassions...

FACT: I have found members of this self-righteous fork attempting to lure members of the Etomite community away via PM’s in this forum, as well as making similar statements within forum threads...

FACT: If you visit this site and don’t like how it is being run, leave and don’t bother returning...

FACT: As for comparisons, there is no need for comparisons...


It should be noted that I hold no ill feelings towards the Etomite fork in question, but I will not tolerate fruitless arguing between projects as there is nothing to be gained by such practice...

NUFF SAID...!!!

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My response would have been something along the lines of:

We can’t steal something that is open source if we are keeping the same license! Have you ever actuall read the GNU? And plus, every bit of our work is FREELY available from our site, but given the bad blood here we can’t mention it, nor the amount of hours that we’ve put in to making [censored]’s snippets more feature filled. But, talking about censorship, all of Alex’s posts seem to have dissapeared making it impossible for someone to quote his exact words for why he left. Now that just makes things unfair for those of us who would rather read Alex’s official words.

I wish the Eto guys the greatest of luck. Eto is a light, elegant system for basic marketing or portal-esque sites. If you need to do things headed towards a more enterprise nature, then it’s clearly not the appropriate solution. You should be investigating MODx, Drupal, Typo3 or something built on top of CakePHP or Ruby on Rails.

The sad fact is that all MODx references were deleted without warning on the Eto forums. We made repeated offers to assist with the project and to get MODx integrated and an official part of Eto. Our inquiries were met with silence.

Actually, scratch that.

Alex requested that the Template Variable and @bindings become a part of his to-be-closed-source commercial CMS. I think the way he described them was roughly "truly original and unique". Here’s a verbatim response from March 4, 2005 (aren’t archives fun ) from Raymond to Alex’s PM:

Thanks so much for the interest! There’s many more even cooler things that Ryan and I are working on right now, too... you’ve just barely seen the surface! ? 

From an ego standpoint, it’d be really very cool to include the @Bindings in 0.7, and I’d really like to do so. Thanks for asking! However, as I understand it, the licenses just won’t be compatible with whatever the ultimate Eto license turns out to be.

I am an advocate of Open Source software without restraint, as is Ryan. That’s why we’ve collectively spent over a thousand hours to date on MODx, and even more than that on other projects like dynapi.sf.net, Zen Cart, and others. Eto 0.6’s being GPL software is why we started working on it in the first place quite honestly. Had it been a non-commercial license (free or otherwise) we’d never have invested the time and energy to dig in, understand and contribute to such a wonderful community and project.

How would we address the license incompatibilities?

Before that time honestly things had been turning weird with all the talk of switching gears over to the commercial rewrite of what was to be boomerang, then Metacube and ultimately abandoned when Alex literally disappeared (and we all sincerely hope he is OK). Imagine my surprise when I got this email on March 20, 2005.

Hi Ryan,

What a long weekend it has been. Man you really missed
something. Etomite.org is officially down and to top
it off they have official banned MODx from the site.

Remembered when I said that some of the comments
posted on the site sounded as if they were geared at
MODx? Well there we have it. x2 seemed to have
disturbed the developers a bit and have caused them to
banned the name and any support linking to it.

A few users have contacted me and some have offered to
host a support site. IMO I think we can setup a
support site using either phpBB, IPB or some other
forum software so existing users don’t feel left out
in the cold.

As soon as you can let me know what you think.

__
Raymond Irving

That, folks, is the official birthing moment of MODx as a separate project in retrospect.

Despite Dean’s assertions to the contrary, we’ve never once not acknowledged that Eto was an incredible idea. We just thought it needed a lot of polishing to become a truly revolutionary project, and that’s what we were working on. The then-current leadership just made it impossible to continue with MODx’s efforts there. Perhaps Etomite’s current owners don’t have the full story of what actually transpired?

Dean’s statements in the thread that Jason reference above are naive, slanderous, hurtful and ... well just read them and draw your own conclusion if they don’t vanish along with Jason’s post. I also find it very entertaining that that there’s so much moaning about what "MODx stole" from certain members of the Eto community, and yet Eto is finally going to get around to implementing TVs and a proper user system in some future version. That and the fact that as we had our posts about MODx deleted from the forums, apparently Alex’s posts -- the friggin’ founder and inventor of the project!!! -- have now gone as well. Oh the sweet irony... Revisionist history, perhaps?

MODx didn’t steal, rip-off or just relabel; it was kicked out and we had way too much invested in it to let it die.

Eto is a Content Management System; MODx is a Content Management Framework (that also happens to be one heck of a CMS!). Those last words in each description are extremely important to consider what’s right for your particular situation (and I happen to think they’re two of the best). Our respective communities’ growth and market reach should speak for the rest.

Thanks Ryan for sharing old reference emails with us, from what I think now its crystal clear that what happened, and it was nice and right step you’ve taken at that time.

Lets put our energies in making MODx rock the world.

Long live MODx, Long live MODx Team

Best of luck to all (including zi )

In reading this thread again, it’s really not fair that the one-sided story that’s continues being bantered about... Does it make sense to put this into the public forums? I surely am not after anything but setting the record straight.

I’m just honestly so tired of the cheap pot shots, negativity and ill-informed statements. I also guess there’s more than a few folks that would like to know the real story.

Personally, I think people should have all the information regarding a situation before they make a decision. Given that the Etomite folks are either concealing or censoring information about us and how we came to be, I think we should share this topic with the world.

May be we can publish this stuff as MODx history ?

I like the idea of sharing the information with the world, this will clear the doubts of lots of people, but I guess, we need to be ready to answer the loads of questions too ? no ?

Anyways, leaders could better decide on this actually

Personally, I think we’ve got better things to think about than this. Like maybe making MODx/Tattoo obviously unique and unquestionably better than anything else out there? Who cares what anybody says or thinks if we’ve got what makes us happy? Maybe it takes a long-view perspective to see this, but trust me, it’s all that really matters.

I most definitely agree that people should at least get access to both side of the story, though Susan has a point about being oriented toward long-term issues and positive thinking, I think this will be made possible by definitely "turning the Eto page". If not for the sake of clarity and fact checking, it might help with closure regarding the fork and Eto.

To me, an outsider to the fork and all, it really seems like those guys are kind of jealous of MODx and simply not fair when other succeed better than they do It’s also been clear from the moment I joined here that MODx had real community dynamics... I had tested Eto a while back (well before MODx was born), and liked the software, but the community was just not enough to make me invest time in Eto.

The banning, closing topics and filtering looks plain childish to me

Quote from: sottwell at Apr 09, 2006, 03:23 AM

Personally, I think we’ve got better things to think about than this. Like maybe making MODx/Tattoo obviously unique and unquestionably better than anything else out there? Who cares what anybody says or thinks if we’ve got what makes us happy? Maybe it takes a long-view perspective to see this, but trust me, it’s all that really matters.

Agreed, Susan, we do, but this was personal and as a member of the Etomite community (and having clients still using Eto installs) it disgusted me to see the lies Dean was spouting out before allowing any other discussion. Couldn’t take it, had to yell. And will probably continue to until they change or delete my account; I don’t care either way. Maybe I am arrogant as Ralph suggests, but I think not. And maybe Alex quit developing cause of MODx2, but I doubt it. There seems to be a lot more to that story than even Dean or Ralph know.

And if I wasn’t completely rewriting the core from scratch as I typed this at Eto already, something I’ve wanted to do for a while now, to completely remove our lineage from a legal/code perspective (i.e. we won’t have to claim to be a fork of Eto other than historically), well, let’s just say I wouldn’t be wasting my time with this discourse. In the end, it’s not a about rating MODx worse or better than Eto; it’s about freedom of information, truth, and ethics, all things that I consider important as an open source developer, and a human being.

Anyway, I say we let it play out at Eto for a little longer, then publish our historical timeline with full details publically, challenging the lies. And don’t worry, it’s not going to slow-down delivery of this or the next release.