On Tuesday, April 08 2008, 20:22 (+0200), Frans de Boer wrote: > Yes, looking at the last answer it seems that they know that they have a > gem-stone, but are sitting on it for no other purpose that someone comes > by with a big enough pile of money. However, as time goes by, the > gem-stone (albeit biodegradable) is getting older and loses it's appeal > and with it it's value. Still, if enough people band together, have a > good idea, maybe MainConcept will give in.
Experience - among others from the development history of BSD/FreeBSD, Netscape/Mozilla, StarOffice/OpenOffice, OnVP3/Ogg Theora etc. - tells that it is never trivial to convert a formerly proprietary piece of software into a free project even if the original manufacturer is willing to give all code to the community. Reasons, among others, are: - a codebase that includes proprietary code licensed from third party copyright holders, code which needs to be tracked down, stripped out and replaced. This is the norm rather than the exception in non-free software development. - a codebase that only builds against non-standard compilers, libraries, toolkits and build/make systems, often using homebrew technology to achieve platform independence. [Something that still hampers OpenOffice.org.] - poor and non-internationalized in-code documentation As Mozilla shows, it is easier and, in the end, better to cleanly rewrite a project from scratch than patching a legacy codebase. -F -- http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70 gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc _______________________________________________ Cinelerra mailing list [email protected] https://init.linpro.no/mailman/skolelinux.no/listinfo/cinelerra
