I have just learned that softwire and swShader has been acquired by transgaming. While I can understand Nicolas' motivations to keep the forthcoming versions of his work proprietary I don't see any reason to kill the original projects. Once the source has been released under the LGPL one can not revoque the licence retroactivelly, so I have downloaded ALL the existing source tarballs from the servers that still have it and I plan to put them on some server (for example gna.org where my other OSS projects are) in order to keep the ball rolling on this great project. Is anyone interested?
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Well, the first reason would be that we will not be able to create a "softwire" and "swShader" project on SF.net as the name is already taken by the deprecated project. Unless Nicolas would let us do it of course. I was just naming gna as a possible solution. I have suffered from the quirks of SF.net and Savanah in the past so I moved to gna which is much smaller but very stable. Also two of the GNA admins are very good friends of mine (I'm not sure if that counts as a + or a - ;-) ).
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
It is hard to have a commercial product while there is still an open-source project. So to clearly break between the two we had to take these measures. Any further development on swShader would be bad for TransGaming's SwiftShader.
While it's probably your legal right to take the last LGPL code and use it for a new project, I hope you're realistic about the possibilities. Over the years of swShader's development I recieved only about five lines of contributed code. And I spent nearly all of my 'free time' on its development. So to "keep the ball rolling" you will need to find a way to motivate contributors to work on this complex project. Or you or another individual would have to spend a lot of time on it. But then maybe it becomes more useful to work on SwiftShader...
So, I don't want to discourage you, in fact I wish you all the luck. But the evolution from swShader to SwiftShader was really very natural. The swShader project has been completely inactive for about a year and now that it has been almost entirely removed you wish to start contributing? With all respect, I don't understand your goals...
Sincerely,
Nicolas Capens
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I think softwire is probably stable enough for many people to continue using it even if there isn't any new new developement on it. I have started hacking an equivalent of softwire for the PPC some month ago and one of my goals was to end up merging it with softwire one of those days. Another goal is to make sure that softwire works well with Apple's new developer transition systems.
The swiftAsm and swiftShader announcement reveals that you made a breakthrough and that they are much better than their original OSS version. If that is the case then I don't really understand why there is such an urge to kill the project.
On a side note I was kinda disapointed as I've been a big fan of softwire and I have read many of your posts about rasterizing and asm tricks on developpers forum and I naively thought that I would be able to profit from your wisdom a bit longer than that :-).
I'm not too much interested in swShader personnaly as I'm mainly doing Audio programming. However I imagine that it is a good idea to keep the sources available for reference and learning new tricks from the gurus...
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I'm personally not too concerned whether the projects continue to be developed, softwire is an excellent tool for me as it stands. I would prefer, however, if they stayed online so others can make use of them too. I'm sure there are people who will.
And Nicolas: Firstly, congratulations. Secondly, thanks. Random note, I learned assembly just to use softwire :-).
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Please understand that not much has changed. The projects have been inactive for very long, I just removed the development page. I hope you still appreciate the backups.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Yes, I have already downloaded a backup of these files as I don't know how long they will stay available once the official download section have been emptied. One thing that is still missing is the tutorial page. I guess I'll be able to salvage it from the google cache or something, in order to provide a complete zip with the sources and the docs.
Thanks
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Ok, I got the approval from gna and the project is registered there. I'll start uploading the sources of all the tarballs to the cvs repository as soons as possible. The project page is here: https://gna.org/projects/softwire/
Meanwhile you can subscribe to two mailling list:
softwire-commit will receive a commit repport for any cvs operation.
softwire-devel is the discussion ML where all the parties interested in the developpement of softwire can meet and talk.
See you there!
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Except that project GNA project is (still? yet? already?) empty. Was there some behind-the-schenes communication we should know around?
Otherwise, there's nothing wrong with author's position, it's really the community interest what judges success of open-source project and if community is not interested in even upkeep of software given to it, let it be that way. Nothing wrong, I mean, if they don't violate formal an ethical aspects of GPL.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
The GNA SoftWire projec is not empty, it's just only accessible with CVS.
But there has also been some communication on the mailing list. In just a couple weeks I will start a new dynamic code generation project for my Master's thesis. It will be [insert favorite superlative here] than SoftWire and include every feature ever asked for. It will be open-source but the license might be a little more restrictive than LGPL...
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I have just learned that softwire and swShader has been acquired by transgaming. While I can understand Nicolas' motivations to keep the forthcoming versions of his work proprietary I don't see any reason to kill the original projects. Once the source has been released under the LGPL one can not revoque the licence retroactivelly, so I have downloaded ALL the existing source tarballs from the servers that still have it and I plan to put them on some server (for example gna.org where my other OSS projects are) in order to keep the ball rolling on this great project. Is anyone interested?
I'm interested. Though, why GNA instead of just starting another SF project?
Well, the first reason would be that we will not be able to create a "softwire" and "swShader" project on SF.net as the name is already taken by the deprecated project. Unless Nicolas would let us do it of course. I was just naming gna as a possible solution. I have suffered from the quirks of SF.net and Savanah in the past so I moved to gna which is much smaller but very stable. Also two of the GNA admins are very good friends of mine (I'm not sure if that counts as a + or a - ;-) ).
Hi Sebastien,
It is hard to have a commercial product while there is still an open-source project. So to clearly break between the two we had to take these measures. Any further development on swShader would be bad for TransGaming's SwiftShader.
While it's probably your legal right to take the last LGPL code and use it for a new project, I hope you're realistic about the possibilities. Over the years of swShader's development I recieved only about five lines of contributed code. And I spent nearly all of my 'free time' on its development. So to "keep the ball rolling" you will need to find a way to motivate contributors to work on this complex project. Or you or another individual would have to spend a lot of time on it. But then maybe it becomes more useful to work on SwiftShader...
So, I don't want to discourage you, in fact I wish you all the luck. But the evolution from swShader to SwiftShader was really very natural. The swShader project has been completely inactive for about a year and now that it has been almost entirely removed you wish to start contributing? With all respect, I don't understand your goals...
Sincerely,
Nicolas Capens
Hi Nicolas,
I think softwire is probably stable enough for many people to continue using it even if there isn't any new new developement on it. I have started hacking an equivalent of softwire for the PPC some month ago and one of my goals was to end up merging it with softwire one of those days. Another goal is to make sure that softwire works well with Apple's new developer transition systems.
The swiftAsm and swiftShader announcement reveals that you made a breakthrough and that they are much better than their original OSS version. If that is the case then I don't really understand why there is such an urge to kill the project.
On a side note I was kinda disapointed as I've been a big fan of softwire and I have read many of your posts about rasterizing and asm tricks on developpers forum and I naively thought that I would be able to profit from your wisdom a bit longer than that :-).
I'm not too much interested in swShader personnaly as I'm mainly doing Audio programming. However I imagine that it is a good idea to keep the sources available for reference and learning new tricks from the gurus...
I'm personally not too concerned whether the projects continue to be developed, softwire is an excellent tool for me as it stands. I would prefer, however, if they stayed online so others can make use of them too. I'm sure there are people who will.
And Nicolas: Firstly, congratulations. Secondly, thanks. Random note, I learned assembly just to use softwire :-).
As a backup I would recommend to use:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/softwire
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sw-shader
Please understand that not much has changed. The projects have been inactive for very long, I just removed the development page. I hope you still appreciate the backups.
Yes, I have already downloaded a backup of these files as I don't know how long they will stay available once the official download section have been emptied. One thing that is still missing is the tutorial page. I guess I'll be able to salvage it from the google cache or something, in order to provide a complete zip with the sources and the docs.
Thanks
Wasn't the tutorial out of date? And I know pretty much nothing about legal stuff, but would you be within your rights to distribute it anyway?
Ahh, thanks for helping; that's quite nice of ya, since you have commercial interest in us not succeeding.
Bummer :(
Sorry that your new employee cannot see the benefit of keeping softwire open.
Guess we'll have to develop an x86-64 version ourselves! :(
Hi :)
Ok, I got the approval from gna and the project is registered there. I'll start uploading the sources of all the tarballs to the cvs repository as soons as possible. The project page is here: https://gna.org/projects/softwire/
Meanwhile you can subscribe to two mailling list:
softwire-commit will receive a commit repport for any cvs operation.
softwire-devel is the discussion ML where all the parties interested in the developpement of softwire can meet and talk.
See you there!
Except that project GNA project is (still? yet? already?) empty. Was there some behind-the-schenes communication we should know around?
Otherwise, there's nothing wrong with author's position, it's really the community interest what judges success of open-source project and if community is not interested in even upkeep of software given to it, let it be that way. Nothing wrong, I mean, if they don't violate formal an ethical aspects of GPL.
The GNA SoftWire projec is not empty, it's just only accessible with CVS.
But there has also been some communication on the mailing list. In just a couple weeks I will start a new dynamic code generation project for my Master's thesis. It will be [insert favorite superlative here] than SoftWire and include every feature ever asked for. It will be open-source but the license might be a little more restrictive than LGPL...