I just don't get this discussion. We've been singing the same song for years now: "Tools should be opensource and freely licensed to make sure they are forkable, independent of single owners, and thus durable" Now people are suddenly complaining when opensource is enforced that their closed source tools will die?! Well, D'uh!
On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Jeremy Baron jeremy@tuxmachine.com wrote:
Hi,
Can you elaborate?
On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 8:14 PM, Merlissimo merl@toolserver.org wrote:
Am 29.08.2013 21:09, schrieb Ryan Lane:
Tools and bots are depended on by the movement to properly run. They're an extension of the infrastructure. The projects should be forkable and that includes the tools and bots that keep it running.
You're arguing to keep parts of the infrastructure closed source. To what end? How many tools are currently using closed source?
For example all my bots MerlBot, MerlLinkBot and MerlIwBot combining about 80 different tools developed in the past 6 years.
What makes these closed? Whose copyrights are the limiting factor here? (links to the pages for those things if they exist would be great. e.g. libraries)
How hard would it be to modify them to use open source alternatives?
I am estimating about 150-200 hours of work. I also have to solve the problem that i know the source code of the used free but closed source libary. So according the OTI i am not allowed to write an open source replacement. The current agreed solution is that sb. from WMDE has to rewrite some parts. I am currently thinking about how to minimize this paid work.
What's OTI?
Please don't use free to mean "no cost" on this thread. In fact, it would be good to avoid "free" entirely. For "free software" use libre and for "free as in beer, no cost to use" use gratis.
-Jeremy
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