20 Dec
2005
20 Dec
'05
7:12 a.m.
Christer O. Andersson wrote:
But, yet again, source *is* available, and Dave made that clear early on.
I
really don't get why so many people seem to be missing that point.
The "NDA" makes it impossible to share the source, whether you have
made any improvements yourself, or if you want to ask somebody else
to help you modify something due to a bug somewhere. You are not
allowed to do that.
Yep. But Dave doesn't strike me as the sort of person who'd be against
incorporating features / bugfixes back into the core code if they benefit the
project - he just wanted *for now* to try and maintain the direction in which
the project was heading to avoid any fragmentation. When the software works
with a file format that's hoped to become sort of standard, that probably
becomes even more important.
On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 02:16:35PM +0000, Jules
Richardson wrote:
Yep, but there's a difference between merely reading it, and with making
changes to it in the form of additional features which then get released - all
when the author doesn't consider the 'core' of the application to yet be in
some form of 'production' state. That could lead to all sorts of nasty
branching issues as time goes on.
Christer O. Andersson wrote:
That makes it almost avaiable. Dave admitted it to be a mistake to
mention "NDA", and I agree. If the code is polished enough for
people to use, it ought to be polished enough to read. They could help with ImageDisk if the source was
available.
It *is* available. It's just not downloadable from any website
because it's
not considered by the author to yet be polished enough for people to be
adding their own features and working on collaborative development. Dave Dunfield
is producing working tools, *free of charge*. He's
taking suggestions for features and fixes, he's made his image format
freely available. But it's his, to do with and to distribute as he
pleases.
And that is a problem. If you rely on his tools, and find it
malfunctions in some way, you cannot fix the problem without the
source. If Dave is not supporting his tool anymore for some reason,
your stuck. Your saved disk might be lost. If the source is available
you can either fix it yourself or arrange with somebody to fix it
for you.