Re: [Opensync-devel] libsynthesis and vformats

[Lukas Z. <lu...@pl...>]

Hello Chris,

On Jan 7, 2011, at 22:04 , Chris Frey wrote:

> I notice that there seems to be a difference in development and licensing
> strategies between OpenSync and libsynthesis.  Anyone can contribute
> to OpenSync and not have to sign anything, while it appears that
> contributing to libsynthesis requires signing a contributor agreement.
> This is off-putting to some developers.

The thing is, there's simply no money except our own (2 people) funding our work in libsynthesis, so we need the closed derived work (products we sell) to keep it going. That's why we have the contributor agreement. Without it, we cannot use contributions to libsynthesis ourselves which would essentially split the project into a internal and a public version. We'll not do that with the version we provide the infastructure for, but of course anyone who feels too much restrained by a contributor agreement could start maintaining a separate fork.

> I have some experience wrestling with vformat.c and incorporating it
> into the Barry plugin, as well as into the Barry library itself now.
> This is wasteful duplication, and it would be nice to see vformat
> support available generically.
> 
> Are you interested in any help with this that does not involve signing
> a contributor agreement?

The above explanation holds true for the classic libsynthesis. I can well imagine (however not guarantee anything at this time) that a separated vformat library could be handled differently. Unless it means directly killing my own income, I'm always open for open :-)

Lukas