How to avoid being forked into oblivion by a more powerful contributor?
- by Den
As recently reported here:
Xamarin has forked Cocos2D-XNA, a 2D/3D game development framework,
creating a cross-platform library that can be included in PCL
projects.
However the founder of the project that was forked says:
The purpose of the MIT license is to unencumber your fair use. Not to
encourage you to take software, rebrand it as your own, and then "take
it in a new direction" as you say.
While not illegal, it is unethical.
It seems that the GitHub page of the new project doesn't even indicate that it's a fork in a typical GitHub manner, opting for an easily-removable History section instead (see bottom).
So my questions are:
Was Xamarin's action and the way the action was done ethical or not?
Is it possible to avoid such a situation if you are a single
developer or a small unfunded group of developers?
I am hoping this could be either a wiki question or there will be some objective answers grounded on modern OSS ethics/philosophy.
