Open Source Licence (LGPL or GPL) - Reality Check

[Ken Ray]

> > No. If someone wants to take the MC IDE (MINUS the engine - since 
> > that's
> > proprietary) and do something with it, more power to 'em. It's like
> > trying to sell a car without an engine... 
> 
> Ken that's not the point. The only issue here is about user 
> modifications of code and components and whether these are 
> required by 
> the licence to be submitted back to the project.

Sorry, David, but I don't think that's the point either. Let's back away
from the situation long enough to get some perspective:

The target audience of people to whom this will matter is *incredibly
small*. The way I see it, this group is defined thusly:

  MetaCard developers who have no short-to-medium-term plans (or no
plans) to use the Rev IDE, AND who are dissatisfied with the MC IDE that
they want to do something about it, AND who have not already made
utilities to take care of that themselves, AND are willing to spend
their time and resources to develop changes to the MC IDE that are for
the benefit of others, AND who care about how the code they provide is
used.

Personally, I think we could count the number of people that fall into
this category with two digits, and probably less than 20, IMHO. I don't
see any "converts" from the Rev community, even if they are dissatsified
with the Rev IDE... it would be like stepping back into the stone age
for them. And those who are using MC right now who might be interested
in some additional enhancements to the IDE to help them out would most
likely be satisifed with a couple of simple things: better/more accurate
script language docs (thanks to Richard we have that now), a better
message box (maybe), and a "plugins" menu (or some way to extend the IDE
to support third party utilities), all of which could be provided as
public domain downloads once a couple of minor changes were made to the
IDE.

So to go through all this sturm and drang to come up with the best way
to facilitate managing the MC IDE as an open source (where normally this
implies dozens of people wanting to work on adding new features, etc.)
project I think is way too early to tell if there is that much interest.


> With a public domain style license such as the MIT licence 
> they are not, 
> which means that a company can use the MC IDE, or take code and 
> components from the IDE, modify them with some lovely 
> improvements and 
> then protect the stack / code so that no-one else can benefit 
> from these 
> improvements. 

If the MC IDE is made "public domain", it really is that... public
domain. Meaning that anyone can use any part of it in either commercial
or non-commercial works and can't claim ownership of it because it is in
the public domain. So the scenario you paint wouldn't happen in a truly
public domain system. And even if for some reason, it was, I think the
chances of this happening are infinitesimally small. First of all, for
someone to do that would mean that they needed to understand the
benefits of whatever code their stealing, and be such an a**hole that
they would be willing to basically sacrifice any future support, etc.
from the community for the purposes of a single product. 

Maybe I'm just being a crotchety old bugger, but I feel that there are
very few people who want to work on this in the traditional "open
source" context. I'll bet that most people would just be happy to have a
few things fixed so they can get on with work. The one advantage we have
is that the MC IDE WON'T be enhanced by RunRev, so we don't have the
same issues we've had before where we might make a change OUR copy of
the IDE only to have it clobbered when the next version of MC came out.
Since there is no "next version of MC" (or at least the MC IDE), we can
make our own changes or adopt changes that others have proposed with
carte blanche.

Bottom line is I think all we need is a central place to store files
that people can upload so that people can download and use them if they
like. And for that, Yahoo works for me.

Just my 2 cents,

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/