On January 25th, The BlueSCSI project lead, Eric Helgeson, announced BlueSCSI V2, which is a near-100% recycling of an existing open source project, ZuluSCSI. Unfortunately, instead of building on other projects in an open manner, as open source projects should, Mr. Helgeson has chosen to misappropriate credit that properly belongs to other people. These people’s work deserves to be recognized.

I am the owner of Rabbit Hole Computing, a very small company in Northern California. We funded the development of ZuluSCSI ourselves using the proceeds from sales of SCSI2SDs. ZuluSCSI is itself based on two other projects, both under the GPL, and we are proud to continue this lineage of open source projects. So we are not, to be clear, objecting to the forking of our code. Forking is a vital process in the open source ecosystem. But when forking a project, both common practice and common decency say that one should be clear which parts are one’s own and which parts are not. Mr. Helgeson, in BlueSCSI V2, is not doing this.

When I say ‘credit’, I do not mean my own credit. First, I mean the credit owed to my employees/contractors, primarily Petteri Aimonen, who is responsible for nearly all of the ZuluSCSI code base. We deliberately work in public, and we deliberately mention individual contributors’ names in the project. Just because they are employees does not mean that they do not also deserve public credit for their work.

Secondly, but by no means less, I mean the credit owed to an Australian by the name of Michael McMaster. Michael McMaster is the mind behind the SCSI2SD, one of the projects that ZuluSCSI is based on, and he is the giant whose shoulders we stand upon. He is not directly involved with ZuluSCSI, nor is he in my employ. But a large proportion of the ZuluSCSI code was originally written by him, including all the SCSI magic that makes it work fast and reliably. He has spent a decade of his life working on this code. Serious expertise and skill have gone into it, and he deserves to be recognized.

Thank you for reading.