DM42 is now open-source!

[rprosperi]

(04-20-2018 11:36 PM)BarryMead Wrote:  Bob: You are absolutely right about "Bad Timing". I know in my heart that this was not intentional, but I can see why it has bad optics. I looked at my calendar, and noticed that it was two weeks since the announcement, and decided to post the question. Hours before posting this question here, I sent an email version of this same question directly to Michael Steinmann so he would have the chance to respond. So far I haven't heard back.

I get it; I did not mean to imply it was deliberate, hope it didn't seem that way, it's just unfortunate timing. It's easy to not always recall that members here circle the globe and someone is always coming as we're going, and vice-versa (this means you Pauli and Tony).

I contemplated emailing Michael this week to suggest posting an update, but ultimately didn't do so as not sure it was appropriate; seeing the timeline though, I should have.

That said, I know it's a pretty big task to totally refactor the DM42 s/w design to isolate the various code contributions as required by the conflicting licenses, so it's not unreasonable that it's still going on. But an update, even it's just to say that it's taking longer than anticipated, would be welcome all around.

It's likely (IMHO, but you embedded developer guys would know better) that the process of revising the s/w architecture to keep the code segments isolated will introduce new bugs and/or stability issues into the DM42. The community during the Beta phase (and right up to today) was very active and spent much time testing and exploring to find bugs (and suggest improvements which led to many of the DM42's innovations). The good news about the coming release is there are many more 'testers' now, and lot's of proven DM42 programs that exploit the DM42 extensions, so issues should be found and reported quickly.

I understand there are several folks that are holding off ordering a DM42 until it is compliant with the GPL (and other) License requirements, and respect that. I just hope that once the DM42 is aligned, these same folks order them quickly to join in with the fun (ok, and testing too).