Calling all open source developers

[Peter Alcibiades]

Richmond has a point, though, when he says:  "to describe something which is
written using a proprietary language and/or IDE as Open Source is
potentially misleading"

Open source is not about what it runs on.  The main point of open source is
that the source code shall be available, and modification of it shall be
permitted as long as those modifications are also put back.  Its the
modification issue that matters here, the practical effect on the ability to
modify of the use of a proprietary language and IDE.  

This was always the issue in the Gnome/KDE wars.  The licenses were the
same.  But anyone could get Gtk anytime to modify the Gnome code. They could
modify or fork Gtk if they felt like it, too. They could only get Qt under
some restrictions, and they could not modify or fork it no matter what.  So
the Gnome people worried that KDE's open status was effectively at the mercy
of a few guys in Trolltech.  They did have a point, and you notice that the
wars have come to an end now that Qt is really open source, and been
succeeded by the Mono wars.

We could argue that with Rev, particularly now that Media is out for all
platforms, free, and pretty powerful, that this doesn't matter.  I'm not
sure how much it matters (after all, I am using Rev quite cheerfully!).  But
there is a real point here:  the license may be the GPL, but you've got to
admit that your power to take advantage of the powers that license gives you
are more limited if you have to exercise them by acquiring a proprietary IDE
and language, than if you just exercise them by downloading (eg) Python.

Look, here is a practical example.  There are quite a few things in Rev for
Linux that are just broken.  Printing for instance.  Suppose I write and
distribute an app under the GPL.  Done in Python, someone who is really
irritated with this can modify Python itself, then fix the app.  It may be
unlikely, but this possibility, and the power of forking Python, is part of
what makes OSS developers responsive.  Done in Rev, the same person
basically has no recourse except to wait, as I am waiting patiently, for
4.0.  If Edinburgh falls victim to a giant tsunami down the Firth of Forth
then, like KDE with Trolltech, the powers of the GPL license holder to my
app are in practice very limited.  There is a real point here.

Did I say 'patiently' by the way....?  Its all relative!

Peter

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