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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday 19 Mar 2003 5:32 pm, Bill Wilson wrote: > From bill@xxxxxxxx > > We would love to make our product open source and suggested that LUG > members help us write the code for free. Unfortunately nobody was We are a small group at DCLUG really so I think it's unlikely that you'd find enough members with both the right skills and the requisite time available. Perhaps opening the request to a wider audience (like SourceForge) would reap rewards. Open Source (as I see it) utilises a large number of developers and therefore projects need a wide audience - most people with the skills you need would begin by looking at SourceForge. > interested. If you can tell me how to recover hundreds of thousands in > development costs by giving it away I would be interested. The costs are only there because it began and is currently a closed source project. (The program itself cost almost nothing in terms of hardware usage, utility costs - it's the salary payments that comprise the bulk?) You could charge for support (like distro suppliers) but that won't recoup your closed-source costs because support will become available free during Open Source development. Once released under GPL, the program isn't yours anymore, you can't control all aspects of direction or support. I'd say the best route to Open Source is from the beginning - that way certain costs aren't incurred in the first place. Netscape4 couldn't be made into an open source project, work started from a new base. Wouldn't that be feasible? I know that every project I've encountered or coded has changed direction more than once during development, especially once the first stable release is available. More often than not, code designed for one purpose has to be re-aligned to take on a new aspect or feature. The base code isn't often changed. Starting from a new base can rid the code of all manner of workarounds and diversions - that was the original inspiration behind Netscape6/Mozilla. It's a brave decision and one that is likely to cause a significant lag in the next development phase. But then once released, it'll take on a life of it's own - you could conceivably continue providing the current version until the open source project is more advanced. > >>We are a commercial software house so licence fees apply but we would be > >>prepared to put an attractive proposition together for a reference site. > > > >Not making it Open Source then? > > I'm not particularly advanced in terms of binary programming (currently much more time is spent on scripting languages than C++) and my Bsc isn't in any computer related field, so I may have missed the point in some areas of the above. I'm sure others on the list will clarify! - -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk http://www.dclug.org.uk http://www.wewantbroadband.co.uk/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+eMPZiAEJSii8s+MRAprzAKCzbCFKl86qF7O6UXVqpKmSSUkagwCg56wJ M2IBOW7J5hXLxc4GmjGGIkM= =H8yy -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.