flyingsolo wrote in Sun Mar 15, 2015 10:48 pm:i like to thank IAHM-COL for you amazing work, providing a portal for all and any changes to aircraft so it can develop freely, and remain true "open source", even as an FG noob i can really appreciate Hellijah's work, so who's to say what goes in or out of FlightGear as long as it's open source and we can share and merge and shape FG just as we like. the definition of free software.
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Hi flyingsolo
Thanks for your kind words.
I am amazed that a "new guy" understands the principles behind FGMEMBERs better than seasoned developers. As you had seen from very flammable responses in the devel-list.
About Helijah's work. I am speechless. He is just such an artist. And not only his models are so beautiful, but also, his contributions almos account for half of all aircrafts available to flightgear. There is not a second contributor that gets even close to him in terms of number of models made available!
Respect to the Fligthgear SVN repo, No-one has passed judgement onto Helijah's work to decide what goes in or out. It is helijah himself, who has decided which models he considers immature work, and that he will preffer to have a time to improve before making them available via the SVN repo.
On the other hand, given that FGMEMBERs is a development sandbox. Work present, distributed in FGMEMBERs need not to be complete, refined or anything like that for that matter. These additional 23 models by Helijah are offered on his site under GPL, and as such they meet the only 1 condition necessary for FGMEMBERs inclusion. Maturity is not such condition, but GPL.
i'm not sure how this work, in relation to svn vs git, but one thing i was lead to believe by reading some messegas on the dev list, is that GIT will provide freedom in cloning an aircraft repo(submodule), work on it, and then merge it back to the main(next, release, whatever) branch with fixes, correct me if i'm wrong please.
You are not exactly rigth, unfortunately.
Althought that will be a really cool plan of action, it is important to understand that contributions made on FGMEMBERS are not currently being made available, or transferred to the SVN repo in any manner, automatic or manned.
On the contrary, every contribution made on the SVN repo are being currently transfer (rebased) to the FGMEMBERs are, and I am creating a cronjob that can do the work being partly monitored, in an automatic manner.
What we have achieved with the developers (not yet fully announced) is that we will be able to release a catalog of our aircraft, that can be integrated rapidly and simply with flightgear (the next GUI that will integrate aircraft discovery and fetching with the launcher). Therefore, this measurement effectively de-centralizes aircraft development, and strips away the "official status" of any branch of aircraft development.
Therefore, FGMEMBERs is just another platform to develop fligthgear aircrafts, not secondary or subdue to any other potential alternative. FGADDON in SVN among them. Everyone can obtain aircrafts throught github, or thru the FGDATA next with submodules, but on the near future with the catalog as well.
It is all up to the end user to decide which catalog-catalogs he/she preffers. Given different catalogs may provide either more complete libraries, or more developed planes.
FGMEMBERs effort in completion of its catalog. But not on the state of such aircraft. We allow undeveloped [read partly developed] planes. (since we are a developing area), and we allow distributions of aircraft in the "bleeding edge", that is, unreleased versions that may still need to be polished. Doing so, allow us to incorporate end users as "testers".
But also allows us to provide immediate update to any aircraft.
i'm really happy to see all these talented developers/artists work in a large(albiet unofficial repo), rather than have them hidden in hanger somewhere from public.
one last thing, i hope i didn't step on anybody's toe's. since i'm a "new guy" :wink
I am really happy too. And I am looking forward to see many developers. New and seasoned, join, in shared development.
Also we are bringing other hangars GPL aircraft under one umbrella, and it will be great to see the other hangars participants to join,
And do not worry, you surely stepped on the toes of some one with your statements. Not something I had not done before

Sincerely yours,
IHCOL
If we gave everybody in the World free software today, but we failed to teach them about the four freedoms, five years from now, would they still have it? Probably not, because if they don’t recognise their freedoms, they’ll let their freedoms fall