if you are too stupid to understand how copyright works, please stay the *&^% away from kicker.

alright. that's it. i've had it. yes, i've &*^%ing had it.

it's a little frustrating that some people decide that the best way to work on kicker is to fork large bits of its code and never submit patches for consideration for potential merging into head. (ok, so there wasn't an active maintainer around for a long time, fair enough)

it's also aggravating that they decide to work off old versions of that code replete with bugs that makes merging harder (ok, so you don't have a CVS check out, fair enough).

it's grating that they reformat the code, making creating patches and finding the changes made even harder (ok, you don't think it's going back into kicker ever so why not adjust it to your personal preferences, fair enough).

it's just plain silly that they change the licensing from BSD to GPL on bits of code so that i can't merge their changes back into head.

but hey, this is all within the rights granted by the Free software licenses we release KDE under. it's not the most polite or efficient thing to do, but hey, it's totally Fair Ball.

but is just being slightly annoying enough?

oh, no!

see, they have to go and take chunks of code and remove the copyright notices to it and slap their own there instead. i've downloaded a few of these "kicker improvements" from kde-apps.org to see what good ideas and code can be harvested and instead i keep finding code that's been misappropriated. this makes the code illegal and the turns the act into something rather disrespectful of those who went before them.

so for goddess' sake people: play with the code, have fun and do cool things with it, but respect those who went before you and respect the law, m'kay? m'kay.