Jeff Merkey is the person claiming the "xscreensaver" organisation on GitHub, despite it not being, and never has been, his project.
He has promised to drop that and move the repo to /hisname/xscreensaver, but only if JWZ flatters his ego first. Sounds like he knows he's squatting on someone else's good name, but thinks he's so clever and well versed in trademark law that he'd be deliberately antagonistic all the way to the end of a huge legal bill. Just to force him to do the right thing.
He knows what the right thing is and could do it at any time, but just look at his priors and tell me he'll do that:
Instead of providing a mirrored repository, they decided to intentionally not fixing the correctly identified problem while simultaneously still living 30 years in the past.
Setting up a git mirror that auto syncs takes less than 2mins of effort. And way less time than writing up this README that's just there to lecture people. If it's about disagreement with github, there's also better alternatives.
You can still setup the mirror and be done with it, and put the original repo links at the top in the README.
The upstream has no public repository, neither on GitHub nor anywhere else.
JWZ might not even use git in the first place, the source might be in a local SVN repo, or just a series of tarballs and patches, assuming it is version controlled at all.
It's obvious that the author wants to make a statement, and has their own reason to not expose their work on GitHub. Setting up a mirror would probably contradict these reasons.
GitHub is not authoritative and never should be considered as authoritative. Anyone can publish your stuff on there as your name.
It’s a huge problem. Glad to see he’s at least put a placeholder on there.
The only thing missing is to mark it as Archived so that all of the GitHub features are turned off.
Opening with the word "I" and continuing in that manner is the real reason there's no official xscreensaver repository
Jeff Merkey is the person claiming the "xscreensaver" organisation on GitHub, despite it not being, and never has been, his project.
He has promised to drop that and move the repo to /hisname/xscreensaver, but only if JWZ flatters his ego first. Sounds like he knows he's squatting on someone else's good name, but thinks he's so clever and well versed in trademark law that he'd be deliberately antagonistic all the way to the end of a huge legal bill. Just to force him to do the right thing.
He knows what the right thing is and could do it at any time, but just look at his priors and tell me he'll do that:
https://www.dmlp.org/threats/merkey-v-does
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitra...
I know that name ... https://lwn.net/Articles/140157/
So what's the point of making a GitHub if you're not going to publish source code? Is this an inside joke?
To prevent impersonation and having people download potential malware from repositories posing as the official xscreensaver distribution channel.
Instead of providing a mirrored repository, they decided to intentionally not fixing the correctly identified problem while simultaneously still living 30 years in the past.
Setting up a git mirror that auto syncs takes less than 2mins of effort. And way less time than writing up this README that's just there to lecture people. If it's about disagreement with github, there's also better alternatives.
You can still setup the mirror and be done with it, and put the original repo links at the top in the README.
The upstream has no public repository, neither on GitHub nor anywhere else.
JWZ might not even use git in the first place, the source might be in a local SVN repo, or just a series of tarballs and patches, assuming it is version controlled at all.
It's obvious that the author wants to make a statement, and has their own reason to not expose their work on GitHub. Setting up a mirror would probably contradict these reasons.
> It's obvious that the author wants to make a statement
Microsoft destroyed his company via illegal means.
Microsoft own GitHub.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
> You can still setup the mirror and be done with it, and put the original repo links at the top in the README
There is no original repo to link to. That's why the README says that there isn't one.
> Setting up a git mirror that auto syncs takes less than 2mins
Prove it.
Right now, I would love to live 30 years in the past.
Using a public source code hosting product is a choice.
Also centralising everything in one place is a seriously bad idea.
> they decided to intentionally not fixing the correctly identified problem
Which problem?
> Maybe someone should fork xscreensaver as xscreensaver-ng as a community project?
Feel free.
Or they could not. It’s their project they can do what they want you are not entitled to their labour.