gnupic: gpal fork
Subject:
gpal fork
From:
Craig Franklin ####@####.####
Date:
8 Mar 2004 04:59:14 -0000
Message-Id: <1078719978.2048.4.camel@r2d2>
Although it isn't finished yet, an individual is planning a fork of
gpal. They will be using it as an OO compiler for flowchart based
designs for robots. A wrapper will invoke the gputils tools and some
commercial tools. That's all I know. It sounds like he will be writing
and selling the commercial tools. It also appears it will be win32
based.
I have only seen a few of the changes. Some are insignificant. Minor
changes not driven by bugs or features, but personal preference. Other
changes are major. They align gpal with his goals and his target
users. I will forward more details to this list when I have them. I
will also encourage this individual to provide contact information, so I
am not a middle man.
I will try to monitor his developments and merge what I can back into
gpal. I bet the really good stuff will be in the commercial binaries.
We won't have access to their sources. So we will get very little
benefit from this project. As I understand it, GPL will be satisfied.
Most of you can probably guess I am not fond of forks. So I am not
completely happy with this situation. Not to mention the fact that the
work being forked is not even complete.
This situation is causing me to reevaluate my approach to gputils
support. I have been happy to contribute many free hours to gputils. I
will continue to do so. I fully support people using gputils to
generate closed source PIC applications. But this case, my copyrighted
gpal code will be used in a commercial project.
I believe in capitalism. I also believe in his right to make money off
of my free work. Because of my beliefs, if you make money off of the
distribution of gputils and want support from me, you will have to pay
for it. I don't need the money. This is about the principle.
This won't effect 99.9% of the users. Most people use the tools as is
and don't try to resale them. I have no idea how to enforce this or
what my rates will be. I will probably operate on the honor system and
setup a PayPal account. Any "donations" will be used to benefit
gputils. Contributing code back to gputils will also satisfy my new
policy.
