Page 5 of 7
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 8:29 pm
by the.weavster
dhouston wrote:the.weavster wrote:I seem to remember you claiming Linux had been dealt a mortal blow by a patent court ruling against Google in Hicksville USA...
In 2009 Texas (or Hicksville as you call it) had the 14th largest economy in the world. The UK was ranked 6th in 2010 but that was only 30% greater in GDP than Texas the previous year. Since 2009, Texas has continued to grow while the UK has stagnated. Hicksville, indeed.
Is innumerancy a common problem amongst your countrymen or are you atypical in that regard?
My numeracy is not the problem your literacy is, you don't know what hick means and you don't understand the significance of the suffix -ville either.
Q:
Why is the Eastern District of Texas the venue for so many patent cases?
A:
There are many reasons for this, but the three most important in practice are:
Judge Ward and the other judges in the EDTX generally refuse to stay patent litigation pending reexamination of the patent by the USPTO. Other districts (as in the case I had in Chicago) will generally stay the litigation so as not to waste anyone's time or money. This matters because the plaintiff (troll) is paying its lawyers zero (assuming they took the case on contingency), whereas the defendant corporation is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in legal fees for motion practice, discovery and claim construction. Even if it's a total crap, flimsy, worthless patent that's virtually certain to have most or all of its claims invalidated by the PTO upon reexam. This practice makes no sense at all. It wastes huge amounts of time and money litigating something that may well end up moot when the PTO invalidates the patent. But it gives plaintiffs massive leverage in terms of forcing a settlement -- and almost all cases settle.
The EDTX generally refuses to transfer cases to other venues. It jealously holds on to them, perhaps because they are a cash cow for the local economy and plaintiffs' bar. All the ambulance chasers that were put out of business by tort reform in Texas found another calling -- as they say, "from PI to IP."
For the few cases that do make it to trial, the jury pool in the EDTX is reportedly sympathetic to plaintiffs (particularly if the case involves, for example, an Asian consumer electronics or semiconductor company), leading to a high percentage of plaintiffs' verdicts and judgments for large dollar amounts. This has its own effect, making defendants more risk-averse and therefore more likely to settle in that district for higher amounts.
These factors combine to make the EDTX the shakedown capital of the patent litigation world. It's a nasty, pernicious racket.
- Antone Johnson
Founding Principal of Bottom Line Law Group in San Francisco and Los Angeles (Santa Monica), CA. Former VP and head of worldwide legal affairs at eHarmony; one of the original in-house lawyers at MySpace.
Source:
http://www.quora.com/Patent-Litigation/ ... tent-cases
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2012 1:41 am
by dhouston
I'm quite certain I can find numerous patent lawyers who disagree with the one (likely a sore loser) you cited . For example:
http://www.metrocorpcounsel.com/article ... litigation
And, here are two links that speak to the Android fragmentation problems.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/dev ... /232600995
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/ ... w-heights/
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2012 8:03 am
by Zebuddi123
fsw wrote:Maybe I add my $0.02...
In short:
Making PureBasic open source is IMHO one of the worst ideas ever.
The following is just the opinion of an old fart, but if you want to read it go ahead...
Not so short:
IMHO PureBasic is not in a position to benefit in becoming open source because Fred&Freak want PureBasic to stay the way it is now: a cool language for beginners and a decent language for experts that need to hammer some code together - fast!
As they already mentioned (several times) there is no space for OOP or the stuff that some users think is invaluable; a must have thing.
And some users would try to add this stuff into PureBasic if it would become open source.
(BTW: there is a nice add-on that integrates well into the IDE to add OOP functionality already)
Also fixing bugs in a compiler is not as easy as some might think, as it depends how the compiler is written:
1.) Decent
after certain coding aspects (divide code into sections tokenizer/lexer/parser/ast/emitter and make it modular with some intermediate lists/trees/IR or whatever)
or
2.) Intertwined
one big spaghetti-mix without the sauce (tokenizer/lexer/parser/emitter - all in one but... hey it works!).
IMHO the guys/gals that contemplate to help to fix compiler issues should first pick a compiler from sourceforge/github/etc. try to compile it and then try to add modifications to it.
At one point you will realize there is a lot of time and skills needed to get familiar with this stuff and really "own it". (you master the code and not the other way around... )
@Fred&Freak
Kudos for creating PureBasic as it is today.
@All the others
Even if PureBasic would be open source only 0.1% (or less) of the users would be in a position to help out the team. (without adding some additional burdens to the dev team)
For whatever it's worth:
If you have problems to understand my long explanation go to the top and read again the short version.
PEACE
Spot On!!!!
Zebuddi
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 12:03 am
by Blood
MachineCode wrote:skywalk wrote:I've never understood why the IDE, VD and Help Documentation are not Open Source?
The IDE
was open-source for a while. Then some idiot used it to make an IDE for a competing BASIC. So, back to closed-source, and rightly so.
That's the whole point of open source!
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 1:58 am
by Kuron
MachineCode wrote:The IDE was open-source for a while. Then some idiot used it to make an IDE for a competing BASIC. So, back to closed-source, and rightly so.
What BASIC was it?
Blood wrote:That's the whole point of open source!
So you would think... I imagine it had some type of clause like DLL creation does, effectively making it useless...
Their stuff, they are free to do with it as they want.
Personally, I hope PB never goes open source unless Fred decides to pull the plug on it.
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 2:06 am
by Lush
Blood wrote:That's the whole point of open source!
The
whole point?
I always thought the main point was to let the community improve and add to the original software for the benefit of both the company and the user community. I'm not really sure Fantaisie Software and the PureBasic community did benefit from that competitor's product
Opening PureBasic's source would only encourage the emergence of new competitors and incompatible forks of the language, which would lead to a reduction and a scattering of the existing community, and most probably a total loss of interest in the deserted original product from the original developers.
Open source software should be like giving a party: you offer a place with food and drinks to people, and in return you have a good time together.
But you often end up feeding scroungers and blaming yourself for being so stupid while you're cleaning up the mess alone afterwards.
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 4:46 am
by skywalk
Yes, SQLite is suffering wildly from their OpenSource decision.
Good grief...I only asked about the IDE and VD?
Use them as marketing tools to demonstrate the capabilities of PureBasic and accelerate the whiz bang (technical term) functionality through parallel efforts.
The complaint of someone copying it for another competing Basic is laughable, since no one can remember who that was? And, in the end who cares? Competition always wins. And why not seize the home field in this case?
Thanks for PureBasic!
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 5:27 am
by Lush
skywalk wrote:Yes, SQLite is suffering wildly from their OpenSource decision.
Good grief...I only asked about the IDE and VD?
FWIW, I was only responding to the OP's question (Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?) and to Blood's vision that giving code for free to your competitors is the whole point of Open Source.
I'd love to have the source of the VD actually.
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2012 12:08 am
by Blood
Lush wrote:skywalk wrote:Yes, SQLite is suffering wildly from their OpenSource decision.
Good grief...I only asked about the IDE and VD?
FWIW, I was only responding to the OP's question (Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?) and to Blood's vision that giving code for free to your competitors is the whole point of Open Source.
have you actually read any open source licenses?
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2012 1:27 am
by Lush
Blood wrote:have you actually read any open source licenses?
Well, yes I have but your question shows you missed the whole point once again: I wasn't talking about specific licenses terms but about the underlying philosophy of Open Source.
There's a difference between what people can do with open source software and what the original developers thought people would do with their sources.
You can find the same sort of difference between legality and morality.
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2012 2:42 am
by Tenaja
I have, and the person who owns the code has the right to restrict its use to PureBasic, for instance. On the other hand, it seems that most o/s s/w is released with a generic license that does permit use anywhere.
Of course, just like there are thieves who pirate software, there will be thieves who put the code to use elsewhere. If everyone was honest, I think PB would be o/s. But they aren't, and Fred doesn't want thieves to mooch off of his hard work.
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Sun May 05, 2013 10:11 pm
by jmcbride
By all means OpenSource!
It'll get more eyes on it...
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Sun May 05, 2013 11:00 pm
by MachineCode
skywalk wrote:The complaint of someone copying it for another competing Basic is laughable, since no one can remember who that was?
Of course I can remember. I simply choose not to name it, because, contrary to what others think, I feel it's wrong to talk about competing products in another product's forum. It's just not a good business decision (to me, anyway).
As for the IDE being open source, I wasn't actually a GPL license. Just the source code was available, per se. It was never released to be used for competing languages, but that's what happened.
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 4:58 am
by Blankname
Lush wrote:Blood wrote:That's the whole point of open source!
The
whole point?
I always thought the main point was to let the community improve and add to the original software for the benefit of both the company and the user community. I'm not really sure Fantaisie Software and the PureBasic community did benefit from that competitor's product
Opening PureBasic's source would only encourage the emergence of new competitors and incompatible forks of the language, which would lead to a reduction and a scattering of the existing community, and most probably a total loss of interest in the deserted original product from the original developers.
Open source software should be like giving a party: you offer a place with food and drinks to people, and in return you have a good time together.
But you often end up feeding scroungers and blaming yourself for being so stupid while you're cleaning up the mess alone afterwards.
Well regardless to what open source project you can contribute to, there is always people who are going to leech and steal from it. You simply cannot stop that from happening. Nor should it matter as a good open source community driven project would always be 2 steps ahead of any competitor. I personally think the PureBasic back end should remain closed source (compiler + libs), but open source the front end (IDE and form designer). If that happened last year, right now both would be as robust as any commercial grade environment on the market. Tho with it being closed source, you're still seeing bugs pop up on every single release. There are also ways to open source a project, and keep other competitors from using any of it legally. I for one am interested in improving the usability and functionality of the IDE, but being closed source that won't ever happen. Tons of code for a few people to manage just results in code being written to work properly, and then forgot about (no performance optimizations, improvements, etc). That's why I say if anyone wanted to start a community driven project for a new alternative IDE and form designer, I for one would be down to contribute.
Re: Why not make PureBasic Open Source ?
Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 9:51 am
by es_91
-500
It's Fred's work. If you want Open Source PureBasic, get a team and write it yourself.