What comes to mind?

plankton@programming.dev to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 514 points –
62

Audacity was the first one I thought of.

Or MultiMC, PolyMC, the Sodium mod, or the original Minecraft Forge.

(Minecraft community devs need to stop having drama lmao)

I love how well the PolyMC -> PrismLauncher transition went. It’s great that the asshole owning it didn’t just spew transphobic hate, but also removed the contribution rights to all other people, leading them to immediately flock to an alternative.

Wait, what happened to Audacity?

I believe they were bought by someone and eventually implemented some questionable practices. I don't remember the exact details, maybe someone else does.

Wasnt it something about data collection?

I remember reading an update which said that the company went back on most (or all?) the negative changes and it's ok to use again.

I didn't confirm it myself, but that's part of why the alternatives aren't seeing as much development now

Wait, what happened to Multi MC? I still use it whenever the want to play modded Minecraft returns

I actually had to look it up as I couldn't remember why I made the first switch. PolyMC was forked from MultiMC after they dropped third-party modpack support. Then there was some drama with one of the devs of PolyMC, spawning Prism Launcher

What happened to the Sodium mod?

The lead developer changed the license to a much less permissive one because of drama surrounding being credited in modpacks. The dev thinks there are forks that exist solely to sidestep crediting the original mod, I'm not up to date enough on Minecraft modding lore to know if this is true or not.

I'm pretty sure there's also a fork that branches off of the last GPL commit but I forget what it's called.

Doesn't GPL technically require you to attribute the upstream anyway?

The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.

Most open sorce licenses do, not just the GPL. I'm not sure what Minecraft modpackers do. But in the free and open source world, you'll always find that attribution. Sometimes they have a list who wrote the software and who maintained it for what timespan.

Modpacks still have attribution but they likely have attribution to the fork. The fork will have attribution in the source code somewhere but most MC players aren't likely to actually look at the GitHub repo, so they'll only see the fork's name.

Lol, I mean it's better to have a brief period of drama than permanently put up with the bad management. Although Sodium is an exception to that, I think the people working on it are the right people.

I'm conflicted on the license change, though. I don't know if it makes sense or not.

That's definitely true but at the same time why do people have to cause fights in the first place, they're all part of a community for a game they enjoy playing :(

I also agree with you on the sodium license change, it's definitely the most reasonable of the ones I listed since the dev seemed to be getting maintainer burn-out and had some bad experiences with other people in the MC modding community. I don't really like the idea of it not being OSS though because the key strength of that is not being tied to a single maintainer or group.

CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.

My big question is, why not fork the original first and commercialize that instead. So much forking around the wrong ways! /s

Because business majors only know how to exploit good things that would be better off without them.

If the good thing is left to just be better off without them – while they fuck around with a separate thing – then people will never be interested in the business majors' product.

MBAs love taking an existing brand and sucking whatever value they can extract. Like chupacabras but for functioning and useful products.

I remember hearing about Cyanogen way back when, didn't realize LineageOS was forked from it

Gitea, took control away from community and gave it to a for profit organization. Forgejo was born

It has been on my list to figure out how to move to forgejo, need to do it soon before the migration process breaks or gets awful.

If you're using docker: change your image name from gitea to forgejo. Repull. Done. Baremetal should be just as simple. Migrations are as easy as leaving all the data in-place and changing the binary at this moment in time.

The project already started to diverge. If you have an older version don't update until you migrate.

DuckStation recently changed to a source-available license that prohibits distributing modified versions of the software and prohibits commercial use. Before, it was GPLv3.

Also OpenOffice, Emby, Audacity, Android (AOSP) (soft forked to LineageOS and GrapheneOS, but no hard fork)

Sorry, I couldn't understand your comment. Could you please explain it better?

DuckStation recently changed to a source-available license that prohibits distributing modified versions of the software and prohibits commercial use. Before, it was GPLv3.

DuckStation is an emulator for some Sony PlayStation console. PS2, I think. This software used to be given to users under the GPLv3 license, which grants freedoms such as distribution of the source code of the software (DuckStation) for no extra cost (well, DuckStation also costs no money! ...so, you get to eat the cake and learn its recipe too, for free!).

...Now they've switched to a license which allows you to see the source code, but does not grant you rights over the source code that GPLv3 did (which is essentially ANYTHING as long as you publicize everything you make with the source code, under the GPLv3 license also - changes to the code, new software that uses any portion of the code, anything you make with it).

OpenOffice, Emby, Audacity, and Android (the "Android Open-Source Project") have also done this in the past.

Knowing this stuff on Free, Libre, and Open-Source ("FLOSS") platforms like Lemmy is almost necessary given that they're built on these principles. Please get acquainted with them.

Funnily enough, Libre Office is another great example of this, being forked from Open Office (and also way better).

OpenOffice was a really solid Microsoft Office rival, and FOSS to boot. Made by Sun Microsystems, of course, and then ruined by Oracle (of course).

Thankfully LibreOffice was forked from it and is still going strong as a very capable suite of document tools. And OpenOffice is basically dead, womp womp.

Lately? Firefox...

It's Mozilla that's slowly enshittifying, Firefox itself is theoretically insulated from the worst decisions they could make, but those safeguards are going to be put to the test real soon I bet.

Any good alternatives that use the same engine, but aren't just "Firefox after rustling the about:config a bit"?

It's not thaaaat different but my favorite browser is floorp and stuff like vertical tabs, workspaces, split view

They seem so directionless lately, and by god is AI the wrong horse to bet on for their users.

I should check out LibreWolf...

There are many examples of this, but one that comes immediately to mind is the evolution of my favourite LDAP-enabled music player, airsonic-advanced

Subsonic begat libresonic

Libresonic begat airsonic as well as a whole bunch of other projects.

Airsonic begat airsonic-advanced

Airsonic-advanced begat kagemomiji/airsonic-advanced, however the maintainer of the parent codebase, randomnicode, wants to do the right thing and get their code up to snuff with the opensubsonic API (not sure where that fits in to thr history) so kagemomji can take over.

Emby

why?

Here's a comment about it I made a few weeks back in the context of why Jellyfin came to be and why I only ever recommend Plex or Jellyfin

This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.

~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don't know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))

Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that's why I'm generally fine with Plex

Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.

Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn't even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)

I don't have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it...yea. fuck em

I hope someone made STACER (a.k.a Bleachbit on roids) remastered
The owner of that project already abandoned it, it's sad STACER already had so....much potential compared to Bleachbit but no one wants to revive it

Fixed minecraft(terrible name)->Harmony/Melody

what does it do?

Tl;dr: tries to fix minecraft in a way that would fit as part of an update made by mojang

Recently, there were multiple youtube videos that said minecraft was broken and multiple videos that said they fixed minecraft

All of the suggestions to fix minecraft either felt like modded minecraft, only considered how they play and prohibiting people from building, missing the point of some structures, making features useless, in one case hiding features so they make their paid mod look better and always forgetting about multiplayer

The one video i know that doesnt have these problems is one made by the youtuber green_jab. They also made a discord server for developing the mod after their suggestions named "fixed minecraft"

Because of homophobia, transphobia, bad leadership and other things, every single person helping them to develop the mod(which, as far as i know, were all queer) left, forked the mod, split it in 2(one is only for the server and doesnt need to be installed on the client, the other needs to be installed on both) and gave the mods actual names

Maybe a bit niche, but if you're in the Scala ecosystem and seen what happened with Akka -> Apache Pekko. Version one of Pekko was a 1-1 rename of Akka

Insomnia suddenly turned into a ransomware. Pay up or have all you dara lost!

A few days later Insomnium popped up supporting the old file format.