The "stinking truth".

[Marian Petrides, MD]

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.
> .
>