OSNews

Ion3 is overshadowed by it's developer. Tuomo Valkonen first thought he would know better than the rest of the world just to sink into grievousness. Now Ion won't be open any more after the final release preceded by this RC.

It started out with taste, or lack thereof. In any way, you should never argue about taste, but Tuomo decided against. He decided, that anti-aliasing doesn't improve fonts at all, but only makes them "blurry". He decided, that every user has to accept this as a fact and therefore should use the old Xlib font system (inferiour in many other aspects, too). It seems he found out too late how fontconfig enables the user to configure this aspect.

Some users thought otherwise, and they knew how to code. So they patched Ion3 to use XFT. It has some other advantages, like correct unicode rendering, but guess what -- Tuomo hates Unicode, too. Some of them even loaded a "PKGBUILD" up to Arch Linux' User Repository (AUR) -- a recipe which describes how to download Ion3 and patch it automatically. Tuomo, not familiar with Arch Linux and the AUR, misinterpreted this as a patched binary distribution of Ion3. He found no other way to teach his user of how Ion3 should look, what it should be able to do and what not, than threatening the Arch developers with legal actions. In his belief, the publication infringed his trademark -- "Ion3".

This action led to verbal fights he couldn't win. In the end, the PKGBUILD in question was abandoned, even without Tuomo really taken serious. It was already too late. Tuomo had a new enemy: the open-source community. A big deal of the OSS world is about "free choice" and one could even assume that the developer of an alternative, niché window manager would think about this the same. Not Tuomo. So while various distros started to kick Ion(3) from their repositories, Tuomo started to attack the OSS world after nobody agreed to his absurd release terms (example: If you want to call your publication "Ion3", you have to guarantee your version of Ion doesn't lag behind the upstream version more than a couple of weeks).

The conclusion was predictable: Tuomo now hates OSS, and many people hate (or laugh at) Tuomo, too. Tuomo declared he will develop closed-source in the future. one could argue he should have done this first place, but would he gained the same attention and user base?


The only future Ion3 has is a fork, perhaps under a different name, to avoid legal nonsense..