"The Software and/or source code cannot be copied in whole and sold without meaningful modification for a profit."
Great to see it semi-open source, and well within the rights of the author, though :-)
http://groups.google.com/group/kod-app/browse_thread/thread/...
It is a very questionable practice to claim to have produced Free Software / Open Source, when in fact this isn't the case. That's misleading marketing, if not unfair competition. Such practices are especially unfair on the huge number of authors and companies who really produce Open Source software.
The terms "Open Source" as well as "Free Software" have a well-defined meaning that includes giving others the right to distribute the software and to make a buck with it. If you don't like that, it's okay. You may still claim to have switched to "more liberal license" or something like that. But you may never claim to have switched to Open Source. That's not okay, because it is a plain lie.
I find it especially strange that the reason for this unfair behavior against competitors is to receive more fairness from competitors. That's a clear case of double standards.
Note that "open source" != "under a OSI or FSF approved licence" and that at no time that I've seen does the developer claim it's "Free Software" (which it certainly isn't, although it does dynamically link a GPL'd library...).
> You might ask, what essential liberty am I excluding by adding the modification clause? Ironically, nothing.
A few sentences later he contradicts that statement by defining what he means by "nothing":
> If I charged $15, someone could ask $8 and undercut me with little effort on their part.
So he denies to others the freedom to distribute the software, which is an essential part of the Open Source term (as well as the Free Software term, which has essentially the same meaning).
Until now, this could have been a plain misunderstanding of the term Open Source. However, a few sentences later the author explains that he deliberately wants to misuse the term Open Source:
> Then I’d have to make the choice to either sell [the app on App store] or open-source the app. I wanted to do both.
So he wants to claim to do Open Source without actually doing Open Source. This is really unfair on all developers who are really doing Open Source.
Note that there is nothing wrong with that business model, but claiming the name "Open Source" for that kind of business is a clear misuse of the term. Open Source has another, well-defined meaning.
The author is perfectly right that with any Open Source license, even as restrictive as GPL or AGPL, you can't make a lot of money by selling copies. This is not an accident, but by design! That's why real Open Source developers sell services around their products, such as support, implementation of customer wishes, etc.
If he doesn't want to do business that way, it's fine! But then he shouldn't claim to do Open Source.
But of course things would be very ambiguous in terms of how much means "meaningful modification".
I'm pretty excited about Kod in general though; the design has a real great start, and the scripting foundations he's building seem really interesting. Open sourcing it should (hopefully) speed it along to reliability and completeness sooner rather than later, too. Will be a fun product to watch.
Kod is a great start so far, but still has a ways to catch up. I wish the developer the best and that it works out for him. Hope it doesn't turn out like Smultron (now Fraise).
I've given up hope that there will be ever an update and learnt to live with v1.x. However, that's just settling. As soon as I find something better, I'm gone. I bought Espresso with the hope that supporting that would encourage a lot of development but MacRabbit has been pretty slow on the improvement side as well (as shown by the sparsity on their blog http://macrabbit.com/blog/) so I've had to make do with TM since it feels better and more natural than Espresso for now.
Ahhrrgg <sigh>
Cheers and happy holidays~!
<key>LSMinimumSystemVersion</key> <string>10.6.0</string> <key>LSMinimumSystemVersionByArchitecture</key> <dict> <key>x86_64</key> <string>10.6</string> </dict>
Crashes on quit. In C mode, hitting return doesn't indent. No preferences. No toolbars or widget menus. It does attempt to color keywords but this doesn't really work, with "in" in "int" being blue and the "t" inexplicably being white, etc.
It's a text editor with fewer features than TextEdit. No idea what the big deal is. It's description as version 0.02 seems accurate.
Con: Its a new editor and needs a lot of work.
Given the amount of work involved, I'd like to throw in the suggestion here that if you are thinking of building your own (programmer development environment -- these things are not simply "editors") on top an OSS foundation, to review and consider IDEA:
(Not in any way associated with JetBrains).
I am extremely pleased.
99% of all software die, whether open source or closed source. Not sure what point you're trying to make. The (flawed) point that something will die because it's open source?
