From: Hendrik Lipka (hendrik.lipka_at_gmx.de)
Date: Fri Sep 10 2004 - 06:13:39 PDT
Friday, September 10, 2004, 1:56:57 PM, you wrote:
> certainly going to be a hinderance to developers working "with" the
> project ie, developers will be less likely to use the DCL in their own
> projects as it is not obvious that the DCL can be legally used with
> their GPL/LGPL/BSD/etc licensed code.
The KRL ist _not_ compatible with the GPL / LGPL. Maybe with the BSD
licenses.
> read that people were disappointed in the project as an experiment in
> open source software I have to say that I'm not surprised, as the
> developers really didn't follow most open source conventions. While an
> OSI approved license and an area on sourceforge is a far cry from
> garunteeing a successful project, it is at least is a way of welcoming
> more developers to the project.
As explained in an earlier mail, another reason are the limited developer
ressources in the Newton community.
> But I have to ask - what is this doing in a license agreement? I can
> understand a maintainer not accepting patches that don't conform to a
> project's coding standards, but putting such restrictions in the license
> just gives one a feeling that the developers don't really want others
> involved. I understand that there are good intentions behind it, but I
> just find it very offputting.
The intenations are to have easily understood code, which should be
available on many platforms. But yes - defining coding standards is not the
task of a license agreement...
> 4.3.4.5 A notice explaining step by step how to install the
> EXECUTABLES if they need to be installed to be used. This notice can
> refer to the documentation of the HOST SYSTEMS.
The interesting point here is, that getting everything running for the
first time was my biggest problem, because I did not find documentation
about this :( (It now is there, but a little bit hidden)
> The KRL, to me at least, seems to go out of it's way to be burdensome
> and offputting to those who are not directly involved in the project.
Yes, complying to this license will be troublesome for most developers.
Just using the GPL, and encouraging the proper documentation (for the
code, and the build process), would made it easier in the beginning.
>> Well, there *is* documentation. In the code - about 30-40% of it is
>>doc.
Most of the code comments (and even the debugging messages) at least in the
DCL are in french :(
> I mean it has spaces and mixed case in directory names, which besides
Mixed case and spaces are not a problem on unix and windows systems (just a
question of quoting properly), but when I worked a little bit with the DCL,
the file and directory names contained characters which are not allowed on
windows (which have been changed then)
Yes, it can be seen that the devlopers are working on Mac, which makes the
initial work complicated for Unix of Windows developers :(
Yes, it can be done (I worked my way through, and hopefully somebody else
now working on windows will have it easiert), but I'm sure that it has
frightened some developers...
Just my 2 cents,
hli
--
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www.hendriklipka.de
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