At 11:03 AM 11/8/99 +0100, Harald Fernengel wrote:
>Hi!
>
>I am just working for a small company and coded a RTF import routine for
>their own product. It can handle RTF Version 1.5 and was tested with
>Word 97, 2000 and StarOffice 5. It supports many of the RTF features
>(Drawing Objects, Tables, Headers / Footers, Auto-Numbering...).
>
>Unfortunately it is written in M$ VC++ and uses a lot of CString, CList,
>CArray...
>
>My Questions:
>
>- Is anyone interested in a good RTF import routine?
>- Is anyone good in porting MFC to Open Source who can help me do that?
>- The company owns all rights on the original MFC source code and will
>not release it. But I convinced my boss that a modified (non-MFC)
>version may be released as open source. Is there any legal problem?
Harald,
Thanks for offering.
It sounds like you've got a lot of RTF knowledge to offer, and we'd love to
find a way to put that to use.
legal stuff
-----------
I am not a lawyer, so the usual disclaimers apply.
The general principle for software licensing is that "whoever writes the
code makes the rules." It's reasonably common for software authors to
simultaneously release versions of their code under different licenses for
different purposes.
If your company is happy with you releasing a non-MFC version of your code
under an Open Source license, that's great. (To be safe, you'll probably
want them to agree in writing, though.)
Suggestion -- ask them *before* writing the code. :-)
In order for us to use your stuff, the code needs to either be released
under the GPL, or another compatible license. If you or your company
prefers to use another Open Source license instead, contact me privately,
and we'll make sure to get everything straight.
technical stuff
---------------
I'm not sure how much you know about the internal architecture of AbiWord,
but we've set things up so that importers are written in totally XP
(cross-platform) code. The way the APIs work, the importer is handed one
bytestream and is responsible for calling an API which populates our native
document format in memory.
There's no need for any platform code to do GUI or file work (that's all
handled on the other side of the API, IIRC). Also, the importers can make
use of our existing XP utility code for string manipulation, vectors, hash
tables, etc. in the following portion of the source tree:
abi/src/af/util/xp/
AbiWord currently has an RTF importer and exporter which works pretty well,
but needs more attention.
abi/src/wp/impexp/xp/
Take a look at what's already there, and I think you'll see that getting by
without MFC isn't that onerous. We'd also be very interested to hear which
approach you think is more feasible:
- adding your knowledge to the code we've already got
- porting your existing code from MFC to our APIs
Thanks again,
Paul
