Euphoria will be Free and Open Source!
Big News!
I woke up this morning, the sun was shining, the birds
were singing, and ...
After considering various ways to make a big impact
on the future of Euphoria for v3.0, including various schemes
to partially open up the source while still retaining some
income, I have finally decided to make Euphoria completely
free of charge, and completely open source.
This will cost me money, but I can't see the current
system going on much longer, where a whole programming
language community is dependent on one guy to add features,
fix bugs etc. The amount of code that I have to maintain
has been steadily growing over the years, and I have to
admit that my progress has been slowing.
I'd like to make everything Public Domain, but if
anyone feels that the GNU license is a better way to go,
speak up.
I'm not going anywhere, but I expect that I will do
somewhat less low-level coding and testing, and more coordinating
and integrating of code that others develop. I will keep
the Web site going as usual, and keep a usable version
of Euphoria, that has my "blessing", on it at all times.
(I'll allow other non-blessed versions as well.)
Hopefully we can move away from the 1.5 years between
releases model, to something where releases occur on
a much shorter time interval. Certainly, it will be easier
to do short-interval releases when there isn't money involved.
Other advantages:
- Euphoria will be ported to more platforms
- since it's free it will gain more users
- since lots of people will have the source, and will be
familiar with it, there will be no long-term
risk from RDS "disappearing"
- features will be added by smart people that will go
beyond what RDS was likely to ever do
- I won't have to waste time on marketing, advertising,
processing registrations, sending new download instructions
to people who lost them etc.
- I (we) won't have to maintain both free and registered versions
of things
- people who may have wanted to contribute to Euphoria,
but did not like the idea of giving their time free
to RDS, will now be less inhibited
What I plan to do is put aside the feature list for 3.0
for now (I've only completed a few more small items lately
while wrestling with this open source decision),
freeze the code as it is today on my disk, and put out a totally
free release. I'll call it 3.0 alpha. The download packages
(DOS/Windows and Linux/FreeBSD) will contain the registered
translator and binder, and the full source code
(including C backend code). It may take me a few weeks to
get all this organized. I'll have to make a lot of changes
to the Web site as well, since we won't be selling anything
anymore. (We'll still be getting a buck or two a day from Google ads!)
Regards,
Rob Craig
Rapid Deployment Software
http://www.RapidEuphoria.com
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