The B9-PWings-Fork debacle : Part 1

CKAN is a marvellous tool. I mean it.

~~It's regrettable that such formidable tool is being run by... Spoiled brats.~~ [edit 2024-0204: Things appears to be improving.]

But, let start from the beginning.

The Beginning

B9 Procedural Wings Fork is a hell of an Add'On, it allows you to customise wings for your crafts on KSP. It is for wings what TweakScale is for the rest of the parts, an invaluable tool to maximise the (ab)use :) of the parts at hand, allowing you to design things that would be impossible or terribly cumbersome otherwise.

If the memory serves me well, it was also the second or third Add'On I helped to fix on my KSP career (the first being TweakScale!).

So, yeah, I used to keep an eye on it now and then - somewhat less in the last year due RL (covid et all, you know the drill). So when some unexpected activity started to take shape on the B9-PWings-Fork thread, I checked it out:

MechJeb (surprised?) was pinpoint B9-PWings-Fork are incompatible with KSP 1.11.2, what's an utter nonsense because I'm using this thing for years, I know the code and I know there's nothing on it that it's incompatible with any newer KSP version! The latest release is working flawlessly!

So, what happened?

This is what happened...

On December 2020, by some reason beyound me, the netkan file for B9-PWings-Fork was modified to pinpoint to another fork, maintained by different guys, without any relation to the fork in question!

Just like this.

Commit where this happened (December 3, 2020):
commit

Detail:
detail

Apparently, one of the CKAN guys tried to reach the current maintainer and, since the guy was fighting a cancer (yep... terrible...), he was not able to answer, the CKAN guy just pinpointed B9-PWings-Fork to another Add'On on SpaceDock (absolutely unrelated to B9-PWing-Fork) and called it a day.

Being not horrible enough, this new fork added a hard dependency to FAR, and this is what broke B9-PWings-Fork users, as the current B9-PWings-Fork does not have such dependency!!

I can't say how terrible misrepresentation is on Software. Had this guys dealing with GPL software, they could had a Copyright Infringement Strike for sure - GPL expressibly forbids misrepresentation on their clausules, nullifying the licensing terms if this happens. And, without licensing terms, redistribution of the software is piracy...

And these not exactly wise guys are the reason I double-license my Add'Ons with that SKL stunt on mine! I need to protect my users from such... (way) less than sagacity.

The Consequences

Well, I blew the whistle as I always do. And, unsurprisingly, got myself in hot water.

As expected, I got myself harassed by the one of the CKAN guys (not by the first time, I need to tell you), and a new thread was created to preserve the B9-PWing-Fork from the heat (what was a wise move).

Of course, some more heated comments were redacted by the Moderation. I'm not complaining about it.

I will save you the details of the pitiful attempts to deny their responsibility on the matter - they were at fault on the matter, they misrepresented B9-PWings-Fork by using another one on the identifier! They screwed up users' game installations on the process. They overruled an author and committed into unethical (to say the least) activities. They made it in a way that the rightful author took the blame. How in hell this was not their fault?

And this is where I got moderated and earned a Warning Point. I pinpointed their responsibility on the matter... The post was removed before I could make a print of it (I didn't expected being moderated, I was only telling the true - and not even on a harsh way!), but once the CKAN guy tried to argument it was not their fault the new author deciding to hijack the Forum Thread, I answered something like this:

(something about not being their fault the new authors deciding to reuse the original Forum Thread instead of creating a new one)

But it's your fault you didn't used your superior experience on the matter to detect the problem and educate the authors.

You are expected to inspect and detect problems before committing things into the mainstream - you did it for me more than once, by the way.

Misrepresentation is a mistake. You did such a mistake. It happens (you guys helped me to fix my own mistakes, didn't you?)

Now you only need to fix it.

(I tried to reproduce it from heart, but surely I failed to do it exactly - my second paragraph, in special, is looking "weird")

And I got a Moderation Strike less than an hour after posting it. (sigh)

Just to make it clear: the guy is responsible for the stunt (legally, inclusive), this is not a personal attack (ad hominem) or some kind of bickering: this is a statement of a fact!

The Aftermath

First and most important, an author that recently fought a cancer is now being annoyed by ~someone trying to hijack his work~ [not necessarily. See the Part 2 for probable and less harsh explanation]. Not being enough, he needs to cope with users complaining about problems caused by CKAN guys, completely unrelated to his add'on that at the time and at this time is working fine.

And, at present time (April 17th, 2021), CKAN's B9-PWings-Fork is still pinpointing to something completely unrelated to B9-PWing-Fork!

The solution CKAN guys are proposing is to create an "Organization" where the current Author would "collaborate" with the "new author" - they are pushing away the B9-PWings-Fork from the current author!!! They decided that B9-PWings-Fork now belongs to someone else!

During a review of old pending pull requests, I once again examined this thread to try to figure out what was going on with all the forks, and in my best estimation it looked like the @tetraflon fork was the active one. With no progress on our preferred solution of consolidation of efforts, and the most actively maintained fork not yet indexed despite a 3-month-old request by its author, I crossed my fingers and merged the pull request to switch over to it.

Source

He affirms that this complain was the reason they started to look on the "problem". But this problem only happened because 2 days before CKAN itself pinpointed the B9-PWings-Fork to another fork.

And, perhaps not by accident, I found this on youtube:

Also on some websites.

Conclusions

Oh well... I don't like the smell of it. #nuffSaid