The Wayland/Weston Fork Is Now "Banned"

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 2 April 2013 at 12:28 PM EDT. 69 Comments
WAYLAND
It's now becoming quite easy to understand why the developer of the Northfield/Norwood fork of Wayland was ejected from the Wayland development community and banned from development communication channels.

Last week was the article entitled Why Wayland & Weston Were Forked. The article was a freelance article supplied to Phoronix by Scott Moreau, the former Wayland/Weston developer that ultimately forked the code-bases to create Northfield/Norwood and was banned from Wayland IRC and their mailing list for causing too many disturbances and arguments with other developers.

Yesterday I then wrote Developer Offers Kickbacks For Wayland Alternative. This article explained that Scott Moreau was attempting to offer kickbacks from donations as he was trying to promote his Wayland fork. He was also expressing ideas about the site being "leaked out" on Phoronix as an exclusive, etc.

What's happened since then? Many more emails from "soreau", ultimately resulting in claims he demands Northfield/Norwood never be covered on Phoronix. With yesterday's personal posting that showed his comments and are against the Phoronix policy of receiving kickbacks/compensation in exchange for articles, he continued sending more emails to me in a one-way conversation:

After yesterday's article, his emails included:
You might want to re-read it if you already did.. lots more juicy tidbits now >:-)

northfield.ws
Juicy bits? Sadly, there isn't too much exciting on the Northfield web-site, which is why it wasn't featured in its own article prior to yesterday's controversial article. It mostly talks about work done already by upstream Wayland/Weston, hopes for the future, and other stuff, but little to excite the Phoronix readers mostly consisting of Linux desktop users and enthusiasts. There's been many high priority projects of the past never to bear fruit.

There's also information on the Northfield web-site like, "Scott has worked on many hobbies throughout his life. One of these hobbies resulted in his first and only Linux Kernel Commit. He is completely self-taught, a self-proclaimed ‘professional problem solver’. Using wikipedia, IRC and attention to detail, Moreau has been educated by some of the greatest people from around the world, mastering many of the various fields involved with Computer Science...Scott is looking to settle in the town of Colorado Springs and is currently in position of perspective first time home owner. The city of Colorado Springs has been chosen by many, including great minds such as Nicola Tesla, who graced these streets before there were many streets at all. He conducted many of his inspirational and revolutionary experiments here, a little over a century ago."
It's in #northfield channel topic now
His next email to me. Okay?
I don't have any reason to lie to you man, and this isn't a joke. Are you just not going to help me advertise my works at all on your phoronix site?
Or just waiting for the last minute? Sorry, you're kinda leaving me hanging here probably already apr2nd on your server.

- Scott
His next email, which arrived just after midnight today, was even accompanied by a scan of his driver license... To really prove April 1 is his birthday? Okay? I had already mentioned his Northfield web-site on the first of April and beyond that there wasn't anything too interesting to warrant any extra coverage at the time.

Now this morning I receive an email from Scott Moreau with the subject of "Fired."
You failed me Mike.

This means You're Fired. From this point forward, you are hereby strictly forbidden from posting anything that are my works or anything developed under or advertised by The Nothrfield Project. If you do not wish to heed this official notice, I will not hesitate to move forward with appropriate and full recourse.

Thanks

- Scott
It's becoming rather easy to see how Wayland developers viewed his other communications as hostile and being poisonous to their open-source project, when just days ago Scott was praising my work and Linux coverage.

Thankfully, there is Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press (Wikipedia links included for the self-learners). However, I am happy to oblige to his request and I have no plans to write news about Northfield/Norwood again on this site even should it ever bear fruit; mentioning the Wayland/Weston forks now for this article is just being done to serve as a public service announcement about no "Northfield" news.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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