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Light Table 0.7.0

lighttable.com

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Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#81

Post by pjmlp »

e12e wrote: post #36
tiffanyh wrote: post #31

So how is Chris (et al.) planning to make Light Table a sustainable business (e.g. "pay the bills"). It's great they have the kickstarter money but I haven't seen any announcements on them making this a product for sale. If anything, it appears they are doing the exact OPPOSITE and distancing themselves from the project all together.

Before asking how, ask "are they planning to turn it into a business?". Neither Emacs, gcc or even Linux have been made into a product. They and many other such products still survive just fine.

You are forgetting how many companies pump money into them, if anything by paying the salaries of those that work on their free time.

I am yet to see "exchange ELisp code by bread" posts.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#82

Post by dagw »

e12e wrote: post #36
tiffanyh wrote: post #31

So how is Chris (et al.) planning to make Light Table a sustainable business (e.g. "pay the bills"). It's great they have the kickstarter money but I haven't seen any announcements on them making this a product for sale. If anything, it appears they are doing the exact OPPOSITE and distancing themselves from the project all together.

Before asking how, ask "are they planning to turn it into a business?". Neither Emacs, gcc or even Linux have been made into a product. They and many other such products still survive just fine.

True, but Emacs, gcc and Linux didn't take millions of VC dollars.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#83

Post by LeafStorm »

jamii wrote: post #16
deng wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I did not get that either. I also do not understand why the GPLv3 would necessitate a contributor agreement, but MIT would not. I always thought those agreements were necessary so that one institution has copyright and can change the license without getting approval from every author. That applies to any free license, doesn't it? Anyway, I think they just wanted to change to MIT before new authors commit withou…

The decisions were largely separate. The goal of having a CA was to leave us the option of selling commercial plugins in the future. We no longer plan to do that so we got rid of it. Separately, we kept hearing that the GPL is a hurdle to adoption at some companies so we switched to MIT.

If you don't want to support commercial plugins, then those companies have no legitimate usecase that would require avoiding the GPL.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#84

Post by justincormack »

e12e wrote: post #36
tiffanyh wrote: post #31

So how is Chris (et al.) planning to make Light Table a sustainable business (e.g. "pay the bills"). It's great they have the kickstarter money but I haven't seen any announcements on them making this a product for sale. If anything, it appears they are doing the exact OPPOSITE and distancing themselves from the project all together.

Before asking how, ask "are they planning to turn it into a business?". Neither Emacs, gcc or even Linux have been made into a product. They and many other such products still survive just fine.

Er yes Linux has been made into many products, like those Android phones. Several companies sell gcc as a commercial product, eg for embedded systems - its open source but you pay for support for your CPU architecture etc.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#85

Post by justincormack »

LeafStorm wrote: post #83
jamii wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decisions were largely separate. The goal of having a CA was to leave us the option of selling commercial plugins in the future. We no longer plan to do that so we got rid of it. Separately, we kept hearing that the GPL is a hurdle to adoption at some companies so we switched to MIT.

If you don't want to support commercial plugins, then those companies have no legitimate usecase that would require avoiding the GPL.

No, they didnt plan to sell commercial plugins, other people still could.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#86

Post by steveklabnik »

jwr wrote: post #58
steveklabnik wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people, even some lawyers, don't understand the GPL. :/ It elicits this kind of knee-jerk reaction in people.

Let me provide another viewpoint: many people don't understand the GPL, and any criticism of it elicits a knee-jerk reaction. I've been in discussions about problems with the GPL in several companies already. The real problem is not (as most people tend to think) the requirement to provide source code and the rights to modify and redistribute it. The problem is the patent claim landmine that is considered to be dange…

> any criticism of it elicits a knee-jerk reaction.

While this also may be true, I'm quite familiar with the patent issue. And I am not even really criticizing Light Table for this decision, just expressing a tinge of sadness that yet another project has switched to a non-viral license.

> Please understand that the license change is a really big deal for some people.

Yup, I'm one of them.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#87

Post by johnsmith32 »

philbarr wrote: post #80
aninhumer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people in multilingual environments, that shortcut key is absolutely necessary.

Fair enough - that never occurred to me. I assume that there are a lot of people in that situation then? For it to be on by default?

It is a problem mainly in Asia and countries which has unique characters in their alphabet e.g. russia cyrllic, the baltic states, certain romance languages which requires a large amount of accents e.g. french

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#88

Post by johnsmith32 »

guscost wrote: post #45
voltagex_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

In most cases, if I've written some open source code I would rather see someone exploit it for profit than see someone prevented from using it because they can't meet the license terms. I don't claim to speak for anyone else but that is the logic.

I support your idea, start a school of philosophy on this? Crowdsourced capitalism?

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#89

Post by simias »

philbarr wrote: post #80
aninhumer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people in multilingual environments, that shortcut key is absolutely necessary.

Fair enough - that never occurred to me. I assume that there are a lot of people in that situation then? For it to be on by default?

Try using an "exotic" layout for a while and you'll see how often you'll encounter applications that assume/require QWERTY.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#90

Post by moron4hire »

jamii wrote: post #15
moron4hire wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, I was surprised as well. And if there are legitimate issues, isn't this exactly the dual-licensing opportunity that open source projects dream of?

Firstly, dual-licensing requires that all contributors sign a CA, which is enough of a annoyance that many minor fixes just don't get contributed at all. Secondly, Mike Innes ( http://junolab.org/ ) is one of the big contributors to Light Table and has told us that many of the commercial users of Julia are uncomfortable with GPL code and that changing to MIT would help adoption.

The common thing these days is to include your CA in your pull request the first time you contribute by adding your own name to a list of contributors as a means of signature, then all future contributions are considered assigned. If that is too much of an annoyance to contribute to a project, then perhaps the contribution isn't that important and won't be missed.

And what does that even mean, "uncomfortable with the GPL"? I have this picture in my head of developers programming with GCC, sweat dripping from their brow, looking over their shoulders for Richard Stallman to come and steal their laptops out from under them. Using GPL software does not have any impact on the work you do. It's only modifying GPL software and distributing those modifications that matters.

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