Old history

The actual Soya was originally written by Jiba and Blam. Jiba is the man that has written 7 3D engines:

  • a 3D engine ("Vertige 3D") in visual basic + direct X

  • a 3D engine in visual basic + OpenGL (direct X was too horrible)

  • a second 3D engine in visual basic + OpenGL (rewrite of the previous one)

  • a 3D engine ("Opale.Soya") in Java + OpenGL (my last engine was too big to compile with VB!)

  • a 3D engine ("Opale.Soya 2") in Java + OpenGL (rewrite of the previous one, with my brother Blam)

  • a 3D engine ("Soya" < 0.7) in Python + C + OpenGL (Python was now more appealing for me than Java, still helped by Blam for the C part)

  • a 3D engine ("Soya" >= 0.7) in Python + Pyrex + OpenGL (I was not at ease with C and Blam was gone)

The engine in visual basic have never been published (I haven't got the Internet at this time!). The Java engine have been published and can still be found on the web; in particular they were used in Arkanae. They are no longer maintained.

Blam stopped working on soya when he got a "social life" ; however he is still my brother and I have good relation with him ;-)

Recent history

Arc Riley has forked Soya into PySoy, June the 6th in 2006. Even if it is not easy, I (I = Jiba in this text) am going to describe this story on a neutral point of view ; you can compare it with the story viewed by Arc (which is, at my opinion, clearly not neutral !).

Arc was 'lurking' at Soya since a while (roughly one year). He was present on our IRC chan (#soya on FreeNode), but never ask me for CVS write permissions, and his participation to Soya's source has been limited to one or two small patches. During the prparation of 'Google Summer of Code' 2006, Arc has been really helpful, for the organizational aspects.

At the end of April 2006, Arc has registred the soya3d.org domain name, and put there a Trac with a copy of Soya's CVS, as well as a copy of my own Soya's wiki. All of this without asking for my permission, which is neither legual nor fair. This is why I never recognize this site as the official website, although Arc registered it as so on several websites.

The heart of the fight involved the Soya file format. I was wanting to use serialization (what Soya used since it creation), Arc was wanting a binary 'non-object' format. I've thus set up in Soya a multi-format support system. However, Arc didn't interest him to it, and the student he was mentoring for the 'Google Summer of Code' started to work on a rewrite of the blender -> soya exporter that supports only Arc's binary file format. Too much is too much. I then tell the story to Google and Nekeme Prod. (I would like to thanks the association for its great help during this difficult time). Arc replied by forking Soya.

In the mean time, Arc has been ejected from the Cal3D team. I have also learnt that he caused troubles at Xiph (the maker of Ogg), to a lesser extend.

Arc justifies this fork by the lack of democraty in the Soya project. However, I estimate being open-minded, by proposing to support several file format. In addition, I don't believe that someone, like Arc, can come inside a project and changes a file format we are using since 5 years! He never spoke about backward compatibility, by the way.

Hire 1000 Python programmers. Make them work on a patch for using '{}' instead of indentation for marking blocks in the Python language (one of this language's specificity). Then ask Guido (Python creator and maintener) to apply the patch, because you have a numerical majority (the 1000 programmers). Do you really think Guido would accept? Refusing is not only his right, but also his job, as being the project's leader.

On his page, Arc mentions that a 'majority of the active developpers' followed him. However, this 'majority' is reduced, as far as I know, to him, and two new-comers in Soya: Palle (the Google Summer of Code student mentored by Arc) and Buddha (a guy paid by Arc for working on Soya; I saw him one or two times on IRC, never on the mailing list, and he sent no patches, for me this guy has never be part of the Soya community). In addition, Arc considers as 'non-developper' several persons, like our Debian developper, which also make a great work for bugreporting and fixing.

Finally, Arc still owns the soya3d.org domain, and put on it a biased message... which looks to me like a kind of 'cyber-squating'.