Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

[Jan Schenkel]

Hi Pete et al,

Good free/open source software projects care about the code hygiene (what bits come from where and are the intellectual property rights respected) and have a contributor agreement which every contributor needs to sign before any of his submitted changes are included in the source tree. It's necessary to preserve the long-term health of the project, and doesn't seem to have stopped people from contributing to these projects in the past :-)

When I decided to open source Quartam PDF Library, one of the steps I took was to derive the Quartam Open Source Contributor Agreement <http://www.quartam.com/qosca.pdf> from from the Oracle Contributor Agreement <http://oss.oracle.com/oca.pdf> to clearly spell out the rules and rights. I can't and won't accept any code changes submitted by someone who hasn't signed the agreement.

I have no doubt that RunRev will posit a similar requirement once LiveCode goes open source.

Jan Schenkel.


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Quartam Reports & PDF Library for LiveCode
www.quartam.com


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"As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time."  (La Rochefoucauld)


________________________________
From: Peter Haworth <pete at lcsql.com>
To: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> 
Sent: Friday, February 1, 2013 9:03 PM
Subject: Re: Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

Thanks Mark.

As mentioned, I know nothing of C++ so this isn't going to affect me.  But
it doesn't seem unreasonable that someone who is willing to contribute code
into a free product might feel like they should be compensated should that
code be incorporated into a product that costs money.  Or perhaps I'm
missing the point of open source software.

Pete
lcSQL Software <http://www.lcsql.com>