PureBasic Forums - English

[THIS MATTER IS SOLVED. THE ORIGINAL TEXT ONLY KEPT FOR COMPLETENESS' AKE.]

For example FreeBASIC lives mainly from a variety of editors that display and control the compiler in different user-friendly ways.


Fred, fr34k,

would it not make sense to give free the IDE's source code (as i believe is written in PureBasic) and let the community compete in creating/modifying the IDE to several respected and supporting derivatives? This could empower the PureBasic community, sell more copies of PB, allow user-defined usage blends and finally give you broad feedback in what the users wish from PB IDE. Also, if somebody creates powerful precompiler backends, you would know by numbers what community desires from both language and the original compiler. You in turn keep the original IDE by law and extend it by whatever you consider powerful and sensible at the time you see derivatives work out fine.

I think this would be a quality chess turn that no-one part of the community would dislike, as long as the native PB environment is still supported and updated by publisher of the compiler Frederique and Timo.

What do you say?

I'm sure the community would love it.

es_91 wrote:...give free the IDE's source code...

I'm sure the community would love it.

And while they're at it, why not include the source codes for PureBasic and SpiderBasic as well.

The community would love that even more!

Nah, come on. Building compilers is way harder than managing code of an IDE.


But, something else --


Bisonte just informed me of that code-abuse story of the past. I did not know about it.

Seems the IDE was heavily misused as sellware for other compilers and languages.

Under these circumstances I understand every action to preserve the code. Had no idea man kind could be so down-level.


Just want to separate the IDE from the language and compiler system. The IDE should not be the major money maker for Faintaisie, correct and beat me if i'm wrong (try).


I'll mark this as "OBSOLETED".

PB is "free"; it costs under 100€ for a lifetime license.
That's nearly free!

At the moment source code is scanned as is; without building a complete AST to support better intellisense.
Maybe PB team is just working on this.
Alternatively, a plugin system for the IDE would be a good compromise.

And tasks could be outsourced to other programmers by donations.
PB team accepted contract work from businesses in the past as far as I know.
Asking for more money from the users for new things is legal and I would support it.
O.k., I also would support quarterly or so business versions at a higher price.
(But "simply donate!" is too less to ask for.)

Open Source: I don't need source code, I need someone doing the job. And someone should lead the evolving process of PB.
So, I don't see disadvantages open sourcing PB, but also no advantages.

One thing I agree: making PB better and better is and was too slow the last years; just my opinion.

But I will give a counter example where things change(d) rapidly: ASP3 ASP.NET ASP.NET2 .NET .NET4.5 .NETCore WinForms WPF HTML JS WinRT; at the moment the best is to draw Your app Yourself (by CanvasGadget;-). You can mix other Microsoft technics into this example; You have always complete can-not-trust-more-than-a-year-that-kind-of-technic.

es_91 wrote:Bisonte just informed me of that code-abuse story of the past.

Yes, it was in 2003 and someone took the PureBasic IDE source and made a Blitz Basic IDE from it:

http://www.purebasic.fr/english/viewtop ... 447#p20447

Not quite what the team intended. It's now closed-source as a result.

The team's response:

freak wrote:This is the reason why there is no source avaiable for the new Visual Designer.

It is not nice if somebody puts a lot of hard work in his product, and then others just 'hack' it and use it for another language.

The Editor source was a great source for learning to me, and so could be the VD source, but if that is what comes out of it, no sources will be released any more.

Please change the [OBSOLETE] to maybe [SOLVED] as in your question was solved.

When I see obsolete I think you are calling the program obsolete not the question. { me reading with indignation }

so people the question is not neded because he got an answer.

Thank you.
Norm.

you can always put legal clauses in to prevent such a thing, but im surprised they had the gall to turn an editor for one language into an editor of a competing language, and i would've assumed that the Blitz basic community would've frowned upon such a thing also

normeus wrote:Please change the [OBSOLETE] to maybe [SOLVED] [...]

Sometimes you need that guy with that beautiful sense of mind you've never met before comin'round the corner and show you that 1+1 will always be not zero.

Yes, the topic is solved and since the fraud case was explained i only appeal to one single idea:

2003 ... 2016 ... What on earth will it take you to forget the >7 years past and be brave, again?

Why not release a very old version of the IDE - not the actual topical form designer, nothing of importance, just an old framework: to teach, to be taught. To present and to sough in. To riddle us and to keep well-sorted out. A bone for the dogs.

Yours truly

fan #3178 something

( Seems capital markets WANT you to follow from scratch ... then they complain about missing potentials, sometimes )

( sorry for my late-nite philosophism )

It's of course not wise for PB to become fully opensource by now (there are many nice things implemented which can be copied by current concurrents like FreeBasic without gaining any improvements for PB), but partial open-source might be nice.

That bothers PB libraries for example. I think their development and improvement might become faster and effective if libraries are maintained in open-source, and team only keeps guidelines and approves changes.

I think that can be kind of opensource which can bring more progress, not only code stealing ^^
But of course it is possible only if team thinks that there are no valuable "commercial secrets" within PB libraries. However no much secrets should be in there I guess, as essential part of libraries are open-source already, PB uses their customized versions.

And anyway that will not work if no enough interested developers can be found. So first should find enough such developers, only then bring some libraries to them.

As additional way of opensource, might be some mechanism allowing users to easily add their libraries (they developed or ported) to a PB officials. There are enough such libraries on forum (like HID I've seen recently and so on). Making integration of them into PB easy (but of course following some rules, guidelines etc (like functions naming and documentation)) can allow PB to collect all the common and useful stuff just out of a box, like that Python has extremely large built-in library, which allows beginners to perform most typical tasks without additional steps.

PS. Anyway all I've described has one common & serious problem - all the libraries need to be maintained for whole 3 platforms. Which makes much more problems with finding of enough developers.

Freebasic is almost as old as Purebasic. Just look at how stale it is in comparison--those open source niche compilers just do not survive.

If Fred were to publish the code to PB, it would be the death of PB. Because of that, I doubt he'll ever publish it unless he himself is ready to abandon it.

One thing I would greatly appreciate would be if the open source libraries (i.e. libraries NOT written by PB, such as Scintilla, RegEx, Ogre, etc.) would have the PB wrappers made available open source. That way, if a feature is not implemented, we could follow the template and implement them.

Tenaja wrote:If Fred were to publish the code to PB, it would be the death of PB.

I don't want that neither.

Interesting thing you say about freeBasic, i never checked i so far, to be honest..

Tenaja wrote:Freebasic is almost as old as Purebasic. Just look at how stale it is in comparison--those open source niche compilers just do not survive.

Yes, the last commit was over 8 hours ago. So stale...

When I said stale, I meant weak, less capable, worse support, just no where as good, in general. Basically, it's pb eight years ago. Actually, probably longer.

In that context, frequent updates do not mean fresh. (But since you brought it up, pb has had over twice as many updates 2011, according to the news pages that come up when you Google change logs.)

I've never used FreeBasic for a real project but I did write a few little test apps with it out of curiosity. I think there's a difference in philosophy that would account for fewer updates being required for FreeBasic - the use of simple wrappers for shared libraries as opposed to the higher level of abstraction you get with PureBasic. If Fred and Fr3ak only had to maintain Prototype and a small number of built in commands and then just relied on users to create wrappers for GTK, Allegro etc... that would cut their workload quite a lot.