kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Richard A Burton" <richardaburton@...>]

2008/8/27 Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@...>:
> You might want to take a look at the license for DialogBlocks
> <http://www.anthemion.co.uk/dialogblocks/faq.htm#license> that is used
> to layout most of the dialog boxes in Kicad. It is neither open source
> or free as in beer. I did a quick grep of some of the dialog sources
> managed by DialogBlocks and they were all created with an unregistered
> (demo) version of DialogBlocks. So even if there is an agreement
> (verbal or written) between the Kicad project and the developer of
> DialogBlocks, it can change at any time and require nearly all of the
> dialog boxes to be rewritten.

It doesn't mean anything like that. In fact it specifically states:
"Are there licensing restrictions on the generated code?
No. You can treat the resulting code as if you had written it
yourself from scratch."

Yes the license could be changed, but that would only be applicable to
code generated with a version of the tool distributed under that new
license. It would not be applicable to existing code that has already
been generated under this license, so there would be no need to
recreate any dialog boxes. Spreading FUD about non-free applications
is no better than spreading it about FOSS, so please try to avoid it.

On the VC++ topic I don't understand why this has caused so much
debate. If someone wants to add support for another compiler that's
great, so long as they don't break any existing builds. It gives a
wider development platform, which is a good thing. Remember open
source is about choice, and you are perfectly free to choose to use a
closed source free/paid compiler if you want to, for whatever reasons
you want (and there are plenty of good and bad reasons/scenarios to do
this).

Richard.