David Bovill wrote:
On 21 Nov 2005, at 17:16, Richard Gaskin wrote:
Depends on the license requirements, doesn't it? That is, even if I
inherit enough wealth to be able to afford the luxury of working for
free, at the end of the day the RunRev engine isn't open source so
it's not possible for me to deliver truly open materials which rely
on it.
Hey i thought you had made it in the land of plenty :)
While I do donate more of my personal GDP to non-profits than most
nations (10% by company policy), I haven't yet become wealthy enough to
do so full-time. That's the goal but I'm not there yet, so I still
charge for my products and most of my custom development.
More seriously this is not all-or-nothing. It is entirely possible
to deliver open source solutions in Rev (what is the license for
the Metacard IDE again?).
The MC IDE is governed under the X11 license, included in full in the
Licensing window accessible from About, with appropriate reverences to
the proprietary license for the Rev engine needed to run it.
Also it is possible to have mixed strategies based on open file formats
- so you can both release all the Rev code under an appropriate OSI
certified open license and allow full interoperability with other open
source code.
The issue here is not that it is "not possible" to do this, but that in
order to win these arguments in these contract negotiations it would
really help if RunRev had a decent open source strategy that they
marketed - this should be built upon Revolutions strengths in *nix
platform as a rapid application development tool.
Saying that this is not possible is not only untrue but damaging (for
some of us at least).
The only thing "damaging" here is a lack of clarity with regard to these
purchasing requirements, of which there are many varieties. I don't
think it would be practical to attempt to list all requirements of all
government agencies here.
Yes, of course there are many partially-open projects, and as per the
LGPL, X11, and other liberal licenses there's nothing stopping any Rev
developer from making something that's partially open source.
But all Rev-based work requires a proprietary engine to run it, which is
not open, not end-user modifiable, and does not meet any definition of
open source. The Rev license is pretty clear about its terms; if the
difficulty is in finding an open source message in there then the
difficulty is in the search rather than what's being searched.
I never claimed that partially-open projects could not be made with Rev.
All I said is that if a purchaser requires a FULLY OPEN solution, by
definition that cannot include Rev (or for that matter Windows, OS X, or
any other non-open parts).
Partially-open solutions are a separate matter, and the acceptability of
partially-open solutions for a specific purchasing agent will depend on
that purchasing agent's requirements.
--
Richard Gaskin
Managing Editor, revJournal
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