X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f996b,f7d991da3cc3c27e X-Google-Attributes: gidf996b,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-07-15 04:04:05 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news.tele.dk!195.158.233.21!news1.ebone.net!news.ebone.net!diablo.netcom.net.uk!netcom.net.uk!shale.ftech.net!news.ftech.net!newspeer.clara.net!news.clara.net!news5-gui.server.ntli.net!ntli.net!news2-win.server.ntlworld.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art Subject: Re: Jave1.1 released References: <3B4D80FB.63F9A3ED@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <1gB37.35076$B56.6848104@news2-win.server.ntlworld.com> <3B4EEEBC.AF5833DC@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> From: Russell Marks Lines: 74 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) Emacs/20.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Message-ID: Date: 15 Jul 2001 11:57:08 +0100 NNTP-Posting-Host: 62.252.10.104 X-Complaints-To: abuse@ntlworld.com X-Trace: news2-win.server.ntlworld.com 995194717 62.252.10.104 (Sun, 15 Jul 2001 11:58:37 BST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 11:58:37 BST Organization: ntlworld News Service Xref: archiver1.google.com alt.ascii-art:6666 (I hope the group will tolerate this in the absence of an alt.ascii-art.d...) Markus Gebhard wrote: > Russell Marks wrote: > > > > > Have a look below for a list of what's new or download it from: > > > http://www.jave.de I didn't quote that, please don't misrepresent my posts. > > Well, since you asked, how about making it open source? Or at least > > telling us why it isn't? > > Well, that's easy. There are two main reasons: > > 1) As kind of an experiment I have made the Jave Movie Player an open > source project (http://www.jave.de/player/). This applet is a part of Bad choice for an experiment, IMHO. I suspect only people already using Jave would look at this - and why would you use Jave if you were a fan of open source? > Jave (and it even contains the basic part of Jave's display engine). > It is now online for about a month and I have not yet received a single > line of comment about the source code. On the other hand it is much more > work for me to look after the source code than simply releasing the > binaries. Not in the way you're suggesting. If you provide matching binaries, then any source code that compiles and has a licence is in an acceptable form for release (since you wouldn't expect users to compile it, just programmers). So this reason is invalid. > 2) Jave is very complex. In my head I have a pretty good idea about how > it works, what could be improved, etc. But I have no documents about > that and the documentation in the source code is very poor. (It is by > now way as easy as creating an object from the class Document and > calling the methode drawLine() or so). Many open source programs are poorly documented, and documentation of the source code itself is *virtually unheard of*. That makes two invalid reasons. Do you have any others? > To give you an idea about its complexity: [...] > So Jave consists of more than 200 classes with about 150,000 lines of > code (more than 60 times the source code of the player!) > ================== > Conclusion: > I will not release the source code of Jave. And again I must ask - why not? `It's big and was hard to write' is more of a justification for not freely releasing the *exectuable*. (Since you would presumably want to sell copies of the program as compensation for all your work, right?) But you already make the executable freely available, so your effort has *already* been given away. Releasing the source under (say) the GPL or a BSD-ish licence would be quite a small step by comparison, and yet it's a step that I think would help Jave in the long run. > If you ask me for a specific feature, I will tell you how it works. I think you already know that that's not the point. > Now I would like to hear some arguments about the advantages for > releasing the source code. Are there any to convince me? Yes. You already make the executable freely available. Why is the source different? -Rus.