Re: [Gramps-devel] TMG retirement

[John R. <jr...@ce...>]

On Jul 30, 2014, at 5:15 AM, rabideau <gen...@ei...> wrote:

> I don't know how many might have heard but effective the end of 2014 all
> development on TMG will end.  Based on the notice from the author, it
> appears many functions (much software) may be free for the asking.  Perhaps
> some would be useful in Gramps.
> 


That's not exactly what he said. Here's the relevant quote from the announcement:
"I will make GenBridge available for free to developers who wish to produce a direct import from TMG insofar as their programs support the same features."

I've known Bob for a long time, and I'm pretty sure he means that he'll make binaries available, and only for importing TMG data. That's free as in beer, and it's not sufficient for Gramps; we would need a GPL-compatible license in order to be able to incorporate any of TMG.

I've already emailed him asking that he release all of TMG and GenBridge under the FOSS license of his choice. We'll see if that goes anywhere. GenBridge in particular might be difficult if he had to sign NDAs with other software companies to get access to their data formats.

Note, however, that even if Bob does release TMG under a FOSS license it's not going to be code that we can drop into Gramps. TMG is written in FoxPro, a very old relational database 4GL. Before anything could be used in Gramps it would have to be rewritten in Python to suit our data model and database interface. That's a non-trivial task.

Regards,
John Ralls