Re: Open Euphoria Licence
No, I haven't decided on a license yet,
but thanks for all the posts. I'm learning
a lot. The work on preparing the open source
release is going pretty well. It might be
ready in a week or so.
1. Regarding a closed-source (possibly for profit)
person or group taking advantage of Public Domain source.
The group could either grab pieces of the source
for some purpose, or grab the whole thing and make a competitor
to open source mainstream Euphoria.
There aren't that many pieces that would be of much
general value once isolated/extracated from the rest
of the source. Maybe there are a few run-time library routines
that would have some small value by themselves.
More likely, someone would grab the whole source
and then add a few proprietary closed-source
features to it. They would then try to attract
Euphoria users over to their "improved", partially closed-source,
but compatible version of Euphoria. I believe they
would have a lot of trouble attracting more than
a handful of people. Most users would want to
stick with the mainstream fully open source version, supported by
RDS and many others. Users would be suspicious of
the partially closed source nature of the new version
of Euphoria. Will the closed-source code
disappear and be unsupported when the developers get bored?
Who wants to risk many long hours
developing a program that only runs on an obscure variant of a
programming language? If users were also required to pay anything
for the new version, that would pretty much kill the new version
right there. They could only be asked to pay for the value of the
closed-source feature itself, since all the other functionality
would be free to them if they stayed with the mainstream Euphoria.
In time, open source developers would probably make their
own version of any successful, profit making feature. Meanwhile,
for a period of time, some Euphoria users might gain some
benefit from the closed-source version, and be glad that they
took the time to learn Euphoria. Is that so bad?
So I think the threat from closed-source and/or for-profit
forks of Euphoria is pretty small. The bigger threat is from
multiple open-source forks, splitting the community into
small pieces.
2. There's one special reason I can think of for allowing
partially closed-source versions of Euphoria. It's
the binding/shrouding encryption feature. Now that I'm
taking it out, it would be useful to some people to
insert a bit of closed-source code in the IL writer (binder)
and IL reader (backend.exe) that will encrypt their IL
using their own encryption algorithm. Both routines are
written in Euphoria, so it's easy to modify them. This is actually
better than the old system where everybody depended on the
same algorithm never being broken. Since everyone used that algorithm,
there was a high value to breaking it. Now everyone (who cares) could
have his own algorithm. It's a safer system.
Regards,
Rob Craig
Rapid Deployment Software
http://www.RapidEuphoria.com
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