Richard
Thanks for the illuminating history of RunRev.
M
On Dec 1, 2008, at 12:45 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
The misunderstanding here is simply that the MC engine *is* the Rev
engine.
It began life in 1992 under the name "MetaCard", back when it was
owned and maintained by Scott Raney's MetaCard Corp.
While it was still owned by MetaCard Corp., Kevin Miller's company
at the time, Crossworlds Computing, built a nifty alternative IDE
for it, and arranged a licensing agreement with MC Corp to
distribute the engine with their IDE for a much lower licensing fee
to their customers in consideration for Crossworlds providing
support for it.
Later, Kevin et al formed a new company under the name Runtime
Revolution Ltd., and in 2003 acquired the rights to the MC engine
and its source, rebranding it as "Revolution":
<http://www.macworld.com/article/25297/2003/07/revolution.html>
Since RunRev Ltd. had their own IDE they had no use for MC's more
"primitive" one, so MC Corp retained the rights to that IDE and
worked with their loyal customers to arrange for it to be maintained
under an open source license (X11, aka "MIT License"). Under those
terms, MC Corp. remains the copyright holder of all portions of the
original code that are still in the MC IDE today (most of it,
although a couple dozen of us have been contributing bits here and
there, with Klaus Major doing most of the heavy lifting in recent
years - thanks Klaus!), but also allowing the project to be forked
and any portion of it to be used for any non-commercial or even
commercial work if desired. In fact, we chose the X11 license (as
opposed to LGPL and some others with derivative use restrictions)
specifically in anticipation of the possibility that we might come
up with something there that could be useful to RunRev, so they
would be fully protected if they chose to take advantage of anything
in it; a modest consideration in exchange for their good work in
maintaining and enhancing the engine running.
In 2006 RunRev strengthened their engine licensing security in a way
which makes it easier for third parties to create their own IDEs.
Today it's relatively simple for anyone to create the custom
environment of their dreams, while the engine itself requires only
that a Rev installation has been successfully licensed on that
machine. Win-win for all: RunRev ensures their revenue for the
engine license, while we get total freedom in our workflows (a
brilliant move, Mr. Waddingham - thanks!).
So while the MC IDE is open source, and anyone can make any other
stacks they like within the Rev license terms, to run any of these
still requires the proprietary closed-source Rev engine.
.
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