Fink Relations with OpenOSX

Note: This page represents the view of Fink project leader Christoph Pfisterer. Other people, including other Fink project members, may have different views.

Here's the story of the relations between the Fink project and OpenOSX. It is unpleasant, but I feel that is has to be made public.

OpenOSX is a business that sells a range of CDs of Open Source applications. The GIMP CD they sell is based to a large part of Fink 0.2.1. Until very recently, the OpenOSX web site made no mention at all of Fink, and as far as I can tell, the CDs themselves still contain no hints. My impression (and that of many others) was that OpenOSX did all the porting - which has now turned out to be wrong.

I was never contacted by OpenOSX about their usage of Fink. Instead, I was notified of the situation by a third party. What followed was a rather unpleasant e-mail conversation with OpenOSX owner Jeshua Lacock. The net result? We almost broke into a flame war and OpenOSX has slightly modified their web site to cover their tracks. They still don't have the courage to openly say which parts are their work and which parts aren't. It also appears they don't want to cooperate with the rest of the Mac OS X Open Source community, and Jeshua doesn't feel like responding to my mails as promised.

I encourage everyone to read the e-mail exchange that led to this and judge for themselves. (Be warned that it's quite lengthy, though.)

-Christoph Pfisterer