Living together BUT not married: RR/MC and Linux

[Richard Gaskin]

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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