Kod.app is open source(github.com) |
Kod.app is open source(github.com) |
"The Software and/or source code cannot be copied in whole and sold without meaningful modification for a profit."
Great to see it semi-open source, and well within the rights of the author, though :-)
http://groups.google.com/group/kod-app/browse_thread/thread/...
It is a very questionable practice to claim to have produced Free Software / Open Source, when in fact this isn't the case. That's misleading marketing, if not unfair competition. Such practices are especially unfair on the huge number of authors and companies who really produce Open Source software.
The terms "Open Source" as well as "Free Software" have a well-defined meaning that includes giving others the right to distribute the software and to make a buck with it. If you don't like that, it's okay. You may still claim to have switched to "more liberal license" or something like that. But you may never claim to have switched to Open Source. That's not okay, because it is a plain lie.
I find it especially strange that the reason for this unfair behavior against competitors is to receive more fairness from competitors. That's a clear case of double standards.
Note that "open source" != "under a OSI or FSF approved licence" and that at no time that I've seen does the developer claim it's "Free Software" (which it certainly isn't, although it does dynamically link a GPL'd library...).
> You might ask, what essential liberty am I excluding by adding the modification clause? Ironically, nothing.
A few sentences later he contradicts that statement by defining what he means by "nothing":
> If I charged $15, someone could ask $8 and undercut me with little effort on their part.
So he denies to others the freedom to distribute the software, which is an essential part of the Open Source term (as well as the Free Software term, which has essentially the same meaning).
Until now, this could have been a plain misunderstanding of the term Open Source. However, a few sentences later the author explains that he deliberately wants to misuse the term Open Source:
> Then I’d have to make the choice to either sell [the app on App store] or open-source the app. I wanted to do both.
So he wants to claim to do Open Source without actually doing Open Source. This is really unfair on all developers who are really doing Open Source.
Note that there is nothing wrong with that business model, but claiming the name "Open Source" for that kind of business is a clear misuse of the term. Open Source has another, well-defined meaning.
The author is perfectly right that with any Open Source license, even as restrictive as GPL or AGPL, you can't make a lot of money by selling copies. This is not an accident, but by design! That's why real Open Source developers sell services around their products, such as support, implementation of customer wishes, etc.
If he doesn't want to do business that way, it's fine! But then he shouldn't claim to do Open Source.
But of course things would be very ambiguous in terms of how much means "meaningful modification".
Compiling it is for people that want to hack the source themselves, it's not the main distribution method.
Cheers and happy holidays~!
<key>LSMinimumSystemVersion</key> <string>10.6.0</string> <key>LSMinimumSystemVersionByArchitecture</key> <dict> <key>x86_64</key> <string>10.6</string> </dict>
Crashes on quit. In C mode, hitting return doesn't indent. No preferences. No toolbars or widget menus. It does attempt to color keywords but this doesn't really work, with "in" in "int" being blue and the "t" inexplicably being white, etc.
It's a text editor with fewer features than TextEdit. No idea what the big deal is. It's description as version 0.02 seems accurate.
Con: Its a new editor and needs a lot of work.
Given the amount of work involved, I'd like to throw in the suggestion here that if you are thinking of building your own (programmer development environment -- these things are not simply "editors") on top an OSS foundation, to review and consider IDEA:
(Not in any way associated with JetBrains).
I am extremely pleased.
99% of all software die, whether open source or closed source. Not sure what point you're trying to make. The (flawed) point that something will die because it's open source?
I'm pretty excited about Kod in general though; the design has a real great start, and the scripting foundations he's building seem really interesting. Open sourcing it should (hopefully) speed it along to reliability and completeness sooner rather than later, too. Will be a fun product to watch.
Kod is a great start so far, but still has a ways to catch up. I wish the developer the best and that it works out for him. Hope it doesn't turn out like Smultron (now Fraise).
I've given up hope that there will be ever an update and learnt to live with v1.x. However, that's just settling. As soon as I find something better, I'm gone. I bought Espresso with the hope that supporting that would encourage a lot of development but MacRabbit has been pretty slow on the improvement side as well (as shown by the sparsity on their blog http://macrabbit.com/blog/) so I've had to make do with TM since it feels better and more natural than Espresso for now.
Ahhrrgg <sigh>
Do you people just have supremely low expectations?
* Changes that fulfill this "meaningful modification" provision.
1. Please note: I'm very far from being anything that resembles a lawyer.
See: http://twitter.com/#!/espressoapp/status/18041354806370304
If Panic could create a TM to Coda migration path for those of us not interested in Emacs or Vim, they could snag a ton of customers. A way to port bundles and to turn off the dreamweaveresque portions of the app and they'll have my money. They actually ship software or at least keep people in the loop.
Adding that kind of restriction will make any license a non-OpenSource license. This is not orthogonal but an important aspect.
Maybe a failing analogy helps here. From a linguistic point of view, the above is like saying: "Belarus is a democracy, with an added restriction regarding elections."
> Note that "open source" != "under a OSI or FSF approved licence"
This statement is plain wrong. OSI defined the term Open Source very precisely, so using it to describe non-compliant licenses is a clear misuse of that term. Even Microsoft doesn't do that, despite their power! Instead, they coined an own term to describe their less-restrictive activities: "Shared Source". (And yes, a small minority of Microsoft's Shared Source projects are also Open Source.)
So although there are different opinions about which term to prefer, "Open Source" has technically the same meaning as "Free Software". This has been clearly stated by the Open Source movement from the very beginning. In other words, the term Open Source has been designed to be a byword for Free Software. You can find that in the early articles of ESR:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html
Finally, note that this license won't ever be approved by neither OSI nor FSF, because it violates an essential freedom. Of course you can always say: "I don't care about that certain kind of freedom". That's okay. But then you should neither claim to do "Open Source" nor to do "Free Software". That's unfair on all real Open Source developers who grant that freedom.
They may have given a definition but that does not give them a monopoly over usage of the term. Language does not have a One Definition Rule! For example, my dictionary states:
open-source: Computing denoting software for which the
original source code is made freely available and may be
redistributed with or without modification.
I understand there are political reasons to have open source exactly equivalent with the OSI definition. However, this does not seem to have happened.
This is only true for day-to-day words. However, legal words and technical terms need strict, stable definitions that are equally understood at least by all experts in that field. Otherwise, serious communication would become next to impossible, let alone serious discussions.
> For example, my dictionary states:
Dictionaries don't provide exact definitions. However, your quoted description seems to be the best you can get out of three lines. If you care to read 4-6 lines, you'll get the quite accurate FSF definition. If you care to read even 10+ lines, you'll get the detailed OSI definition.
> Indeed, this definition is more in line with what many people think when they hear "open source".
That's an important issue. Neither the term Free Software nor the term Open Source are completely self-explanatory. So people will inevitably have misconceptions about those if they've neither read a proper definition, nor had someone explaining it well enough to them.
The concrete issue with the term "Free Software" is that people might think: Oh, this software is free (no cost), so it must be Free Software. Eric S. Raymond and others tried to solve that problem by inventing a new synonym, "Open Source".
However, the term "Open Source" has issues as well, because people might think: Oh, the source code lies open in front of me, so it must be Open Source.
Note that this is a general problem. Hardly any technical term is totally self-evident to ordinary people. Just because a technical term is not self-explanatory doesn't mean you can simply ignore its exact definition.
It's not as liberating as Open Souce, but without gradations in the standard you force people to choose between two radicalized tendencies.
10.6 is much nicer than 10.5 on a bunch of levels. It's slightly annoying now, but will pay off in the future.
I don't think that your definition of "open source" (or even "Open Source") meets that test. I think most people probably still think of it meaning that all of the source code is available to you to read/modify/compile.
What set of legal restrictions govern that is another can of worms. The software might be illegal, patented, or otherwise restricted, but those issues are independent of whether the source code is available or not.
This is entirely subjective per my experience:
- the 10.5 'feels' more responsive.
- the beachball is a very frequent event in the 10.6, specially Safari, sometimes even when switching tabs which is quite annoying.
- I haven't rebooted the old MBP in months. Sitting pretty on my desk. The new one has frozen few times and occasionally I feel the need to put it out of its misery myself.
Seriously, I know people who have a reason not to upgrade. You don't seem to be one of those people. Those people are on worse operating systems than you are.