Comment Re:Short term career (Score 1) 504
The project wasn't licensed as BSD or GPL before hand, but 12,000 lines of it came with me to the job. He seemed to feel that since our product was now based on it, that he should have control over whether it would be open sourced.
They didn't want the responsibility of maintaining an open source project. Given the complexity of the code involved (real-time multimedia processing etc...) they felt that there was a much higher likelihood that instead of receiving the benefits of the open source community, they would instead bare the burdens of it. In hindsight, the point was valid. They had nothing to gain from open sourcing, so they'd prefer that it weren't a distraction.
As a result, I spent my weekends rewriting instead of improving what we had, but it also gave me a great sandbox to experiment in. This way I was making major architectural modifications to the open source project... (which I just check isn't even online anymore
I'm doing something similar now, actually writing a C++ alternative to GStreamer, having a blast doing it and although I maintain two copies (one for the office, one for my open source project) it's great since the open source to-be implementation is really very versatile while the one we use at work is more specialized as it is optimized to work on DSPs (which require entirely different optimizations from x86). I'm looking forward to releasing it soon as well. So far, it's a pretty reliable platform for IPTV (transport stream, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 etc...) and it's REALLY easy to code for. It'll be modified BSD something like "if you use it, please put my name in the license somewhere" kind of thing.