On Aug 30, 9:16*am, "Surfer!" wrote:
"Max Kellermann" wrote in message

...

Surfer! wrote:
but for most of us being able to make changes is a pipe-dream and
touting it as a benefit of Open Source is missing the point.

Missing what point?

I described how non-developers can benefit from Open Source software.
You may or may not perceive and appreciate this advantage, but you're
not an elected spokesperson for the group "most of us".

So in your view "most of us" would be capable of amending the code and
achieving something that works?

I doubt it very much. *There seem to be a lot of IT people in gliding, but I
still suspect that most of us are not capable of changing something like XC
Soar.



What most of us want is good software with a responsive development
team, regardless of what the licensing is.

Everybody has his/her own reasons for choosing a software platform.
Some people care about licensing, some don't.

If you really don't care about licensing, then why do you participate
in this thread, which is all about licensing?

It was the statement that being allowed to change the source is a benefit..
It's only a benefit is one is able to do so, for anyone who can't it's not a
benefit - they are just as tied into the development team as they would be
with a commercial product.

I think you are underestimating the power of the "free" software in
the sense of the GPL. You and others can benefit from the freedom of
any developer to modify, fix bugs etc in the GPL'ed code. Does it
guarantee that will happen? Of course not. But an individual developer
not releasing code to others guarantees others will never be able to
improve the code or fix problems.

But so what anyhow. Here is a straightforward case of somebody
modified GPL code and distributing binaries and so violating the GPL
license by not releasing code changes as required. If somebody does
not want to operate under those license restrictions, then don't use
other developers GPL protected code in you work. This stuff might seem
unusual to non-developers or those outside the software industry but
all this should be very straightforward to a software developer
working in open-source. The cure can be as easy as just dropping a
snapshot/tarball of the current code online, an operation fairly
trivial to add to an automated software build/makefile.


Darryl