Comment Re:what about open source on the Mac? (Score 2) 256
IMHO, the Mac has had a lot of strong shareware development, but personally, the hastle of getting the $10 or $20 bucks per install isn't worth the effort of putting in nagware or timeout schemes - i'd rather put my time and effort into building better features than lock users out.
In my practical experience from being the principal on a MacOS open source project (http://www.webdav.org/goliath), I decided to use the GPL over other licenses (including LGPL) for the fact that it offers me and my code the best protection. The other side of the balance can include, however, adoption of your project/library. For example, there is only one WebDAV client library for MacOS (mine), and it is open source. Putting that under LGPL would put me and other open source developers at a disadvantage since any commercial software vendor (Apple included) could come down and basically incorporate the code into a commercial product and benefit at the cost of open source initiatives. In other cases (like the GNU GLibC), it may be beneficial to LGPL the source to gain acceptance/ubiquity.
My biggest challenge has been growing a community around my product, but I've been surprised at the number of places where links to the project have shown up (C-Net and Apple.com especially). I've also been lucky in that my project is part of a bigger, open standrad and cross platform community (being the associated WebDAV protocols).
The thing that would help me the most as a MacOS open source developer would be for Apple to open up their ADC seeding for a minimal cost to qualified open source developers (qualified being that you've at least shipped something and minimal cost being enough to cover CD-ROM pressing/shipping charges and adminstrative expenses). I hope that the development tools derived from the NeXTStep ProjectBuilder and InterfaceBuilder remain free and come with MacOSX; having GCC for mach-o binaries is going to be a boon as well. I love the MetroWerks environment, but for the $500 it costs, gdb/gcc and make work for me.
In my practical experience from being the principal on a MacOS open source project (http://www.webdav.org/goliath), I decided to use the GPL over other licenses (including LGPL) for the fact that it offers me and my code the best protection. The other side of the balance can include, however, adoption of your project/library. For example, there is only one WebDAV client library for MacOS (mine), and it is open source. Putting that under LGPL would put me and other open source developers at a disadvantage since any commercial software vendor (Apple included) could come down and basically incorporate the code into a commercial product and benefit at the cost of open source initiatives. In other cases (like the GNU GLibC), it may be beneficial to LGPL the source to gain acceptance/ubiquity.
My biggest challenge has been growing a community around my product, but I've been surprised at the number of places where links to the project have shown up (C-Net and Apple.com especially). I've also been lucky in that my project is part of a bigger, open standrad and cross platform community (being the associated WebDAV protocols).
The thing that would help me the most as a MacOS open source developer would be for Apple to open up their ADC seeding for a minimal cost to qualified open source developers (qualified being that you've at least shipped something and minimal cost being enough to cover CD-ROM pressing/shipping charges and adminstrative expenses). I hope that the development tools derived from the NeXTStep ProjectBuilder and InterfaceBuilder remain free and come with MacOSX; having GCC for mach-o binaries is going to be a boon as well. I love the MetroWerks environment, but for the $500 it costs, gdb/gcc and make work for me.
