The following is off-topic, but I always make at least one rebuttal to "don't touch Windows!" religion. Skip now if you don't want to read. Ian Gulliver wrote: > > The original clarification of this idea comes from Felix von Leitner. > > Please do not port software to Windows, or, by extension, assist in > porting software to non-free operating systems. While GPL licensed > software specifically permits this, DON'T DO IT AND DON'T > HELP. Making > Windows more usable gives users less reason to switch to free software > and more reason to continue funnelling time, effort and money into > people and companies who take away freedom at every opportunity. Well, I take the world view that open source is definitely possible on Windows, and that the underlying choice of OS should be rendered irrelevant. If I had my way, everything would run on top of OpenGL and it would be a completely self-contained "OS" that's portable to anywhere. But I haven't had my way yet. It's a huuuuge project, and not one I can afford to work on right now. I looked at doing such a thing under Python, but not enough extant code was available to cobble it together. There's a point at which us MIT/BSD guys laugh and say, you GPL guys don't really believe in freedom. You believe in controlling people. GPL as a tool works fine in many circumstances. GPL as a religion is darned tiresome. I don't think I'd want to start an open source game project on the net and license it MIT/BSD. Some company would just come along, take the complete game, and sell it. I think that 'free beer' money should go to the people who built the complete game. A *3D engine*, on the other hand, is a different story. It is not a complete game, it is an underlying project component. One such MIT licensed engine is The Nebula Device http://nebuladevice.cubik.org . Radon Labs provided the first big cut of code for it, and they continue to do code drops for the public project. How do they stand to ever make money for their effort? Well, you can buy their proprietary Maya plug-in for the engine. You don't have to, you could write your own, but it would be a lot of work. I think it's perfectly reasonable for Radon Labs to provide developers a way to save work, in exchange for $$$. They've offered a huge chunk of 'free stuff' right up front, both in terms of speech and beer. They are deserving. Hope their business model continues to work. Crystal Space http://crystal.sourceforge.net/ is the nearest open source competitor to Nebula2. It is licensed under the LGPL, a reasonable if not ideal license for commercial work. Last I checked (6 months ago) it was way behind Nebula2 in capabilities. Why? Because Crystal Space has no commercial component. It's all volunteer, there's no for-profit company driving any part of the development. So who's really getting the job done here? Seems like commercial Windows game developers are getting the job done, because that's the main market for games. It's where the 3D developer talent and effort is strongest. Lots of programming language authors have released their work under MIT/BSD licenses. This makes language variants more likely to flourish. The language research can and does get folded back into the progenitor language - human personalities willing! So much of open source is about ego schisms. Look at GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs, for instance. Often it's not really about the license, it's about the people. Or different project schedules and needed results, if you want to take that view. GPL adherants are laboring under the delusion that theirs is the only open source model that can possibly be successful. The OSI demonstrates otherwise. http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA 20% of the world is real. 80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads. _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
