Internet Explorer versus Mozilla
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3.4 Such Attacks Benefit the Attackers
Indeed, the primary promotional stunt for the rest of 2003 by both the first fork of xMule by Alo Sarv (who now is with aMule) on 28 July 2003 and the subsequent aMule fork on 22 August 2003 was the public demotion of myself personally, and the frequent spreading of misstatements by both projects' developers that "xMule is dead", "HopeSeekr is a dictator", etc. The result: during a 4 week lull in my activities (due to a hectic Christmas season) the bulk of xMule users "believed" the propaganda and switched to aMule.
3.5 The Direct Assault on xMule.org
The dirty actions climaxed when -- after xMule started recouping marketshare in March 2004, due to its stability vs aMule's -- a self-described aMule sympathizer continually DDoS'd xmule.org for ~60 days from March 26 to May 20, ultimately causing me to lose all rights to the very domain itself. With no publically-known website, with a flurry of additional promulgated misstatements, the vast majority of the general public believed xMule to be totally and effectively permanently dead; aMule being the only real alternative for non-win32 users. Today, due mostly to the DDoS and subsequent loss of xmule.org, xmule.ws receives roughly 1/10th of the number of hits xmule.org received in its first 20 days of existence, or roughly 1/20th the maximum recorded. It is my understanding that virtually every displaced hit has gone to amule.org, as it is far older than xMule.ws, more publicized by its developers, and higher up on the google ranking than xMule.ws is because of it.
3.6 Conclusion
The GNU Public License (GPL) explicitly denies developers *all* priveledges they traditionally have had to protect their work. It was designed under the assumptions that in an idealized anarchic and "free" (as in of value) world, every one would play nice for the benefit of all humanity. Unfortunately, this does not mirror reality. The CEO of Gentoo has had his own personal experiences with hostile people who fork GPL projects and then turn hostile, and his essay is indicative of how the GPL is many times insufficient in stopping the more steadfast of attackers. In the end, the aMule fork qualifies under every major characteristic that the essay lists as a "show stopper" for peaceful co-development of mutually-derived projects. Thus, after personally trying to make peace thirteen times over the last 12 months, I am afraid the only way peace can be achieved is for either the aMule developers to marginalize both deltaHF and Kry, or for significant numbers of aMule users to take a moral stand and boycott aMule not because xMule is supposedly better (this is irrelevant) but out of a concern for the hostile actions that are committed far more globally and regularly by aMule than xMule. Neither eventuality is any thing but saturninely remote.
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