Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 14th Jan 2007 23:31 UTC
The shared source licence being drawn up as part of the RISC OS Open project is in the hands of lawyers, it was revealed this week. In a report to be published by Archive magazine, Castle are said to have spent a 'lot of money' on legal bills to make the licence watertight. The company fears loopholes may be found in their complex shared source agreement which could allow royalty free use of the source code for commercial purposes or let people avoid disclosing updates to the RISC OS blueprints.
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Member since:2005-07-13
I think your point is a good one. They've not proposed an open source licence and this could be a problem.
However, RISC OS is still a commercially driven OS, and it's good to see that Castle (the OS 'owners') think there is still something to be commercially exploited. I was initially worried that the whole shared source initiative was just a way to wash their hands of ever having to develop the OS themselves.
Also, it's worth bearing in mind that the existing RISC OS userbase is pretty much hard-core and already benefits from a strong community (by necessity, unfortunately, as it's such a small platform). This will hopefully mean that people do get involved in development.
However, I certainly can see that the style of the licence may well affect whether new users are brought to the OS. Personally, I'm hoping it's not doomed to fail, and will be a positive thing.
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2006-02-25
How is this different than Windows CE, Java, Solaris (at some point), etc? This kind of "shared source" licenses have proven over time to be of little use for most developers, and not "open" enough to have a strong community behind. I don't think it's a matter of being low cost, as mentioned in the article.