Open SIMH Has Forked

Good.

I had reason to make some small commits to simh in the last couple years. I personally had no major issue, but did find the behavior of the maintainer Mark Pizzolato a bit odd, overbearing, over-focused on "users' running "officially" supported configs, etc. No matter - my PR was accepted, as were many others.

But it gave me real pause when I noticed how another PR that I would have loved to see (from a total stranger to btw.) went. https://github.com/simh/simh/pull/775 and https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1093. So that was a bit of a sign.

But this license baloney (see https://github.com/simh/simh/blob/master/LICENSE.txt) he tried to pull is just crazy. I'm personally irritated enough about the stewardship of my dumb 2 line fix that I'll spend 30 seconds writing this. I expect my contributions to be "in = out" under the existing X11 license. Period.

Good. This is a perfect case for a "good" fork. I wish the new Open-SIMH group the best and I suspect and hope that this will invigorate the development of what is an awesome and important part of computer history.

It's nice to see a well reasoned response to attempts to play games with licenses.

I feel quite a bit safer moving forward knowing that features won't be introduced that cause data corruption because someone decided to force those features on everyone else. I spent many hours recreating and redoing work because of those poorly thought out and poorly implemented "features".

Here's the announcement:

https://groups.io/g/simh/message/1659

I've dipped into the shallows of the SIMH project now and then over the years, though not much over the past year or so. What was the situation that led to this?