SCO Makes Open Source Contributions

Ethanol writes: "SCO announced this morning that they're releasing cscope (a really, really sharp development tool for large C/C++ projects) and will soon release fur (a profiling/analysis/reordering tool for relocatable binaries that can speed up execution times quite a bit) under the BSD license. See their press release for details. "

Comments

How long does it take before it is up to speed?

[kris]

According to my personal experience with Open
Source projects (http://phplib.netuse.de) it
takes at least 6 months starting with the release
of proper documentation until you get the first
developers who really grok what is going on.

It takes at least 12 months for the project
to get a proper community which is able to
self-support itself. Finding developers with
a vision who are able to develop the project
beyond its current scope depends on luck and
charisma. No time scope can ge given for that.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp

Ok here...

[genki]

First of all, I'll echo the obligatory "BSD licencse rulez! GPL SUCKZ!" so that everybody else gets moderated at 0, Redundant.

Secondly, I'd like to say that SCO is very brave releasing as BSD instead of GPL or a custom-designed licence deisgned to protect them. Under the BSD license, (IANAL) incorporation into proprietary products is allowed - that means that Mickeysoft could go off and take SCO's stuff and come out with Visual (insert name of SCO tool here)++. Good for them - it shows true faith in the Open Source community.

Thirdly, this might be an experiment by SCO on Open Source. Let's not let them down - further openings will be good. Let's not forget that there is some virtue to SVR4 Unix, and I'd like to see some of those tools and abilities on Linux.

---------------------------------

How much help commercial open source apps get?

[alexhmit01]

One of the big things Open Source advocates have been asking companies to do is BSD or GPL applications that they plan to drop support for. If they no longer plan to profit off them, why not allow the users to keep, maintain, and improve them. The real answer is the upgrade treadmill, but no need to discuss that.

I am not terribly familiar with this product, but obviously this is a good thing, you can learn something from any sample of code.

What I wonder, is when companies release their source code like this, how much do users pick it up, redistribute, etc.? I mean, Darwin and Mozilla looked dead for a while, but then they picked open some help (I know Mozilla did, did Darwin?). Mozilla and Darwin were HUGE projects, it makes sense that users took a while to jump in there. On the otherhand, will a project like this be picked up and improved by proponents of open source, or will we just say, "finally, they get it" take their software and run?

I mean, the idea is, according to RMS, we have a fundamental right to copy digital data, and that licenses that prohibit this are fundamentally immoral, so he'll write a free OS that we can copy.

The Linux community says, we'll work with corporate interests, because they can sell support. We'll help improve the product, and you can sell support for it and make lots of money.

Now, is the latter true? Are we helping the companies that are releasing their source code with the promise that we will help, or are we grabbing their code and adding the useful bits into our pet GPL projects?

Alex

Kick Ass!

[Greyfox]

I work on a lot of commercial unices and Cscope is a VERY handy program analysis tool. It's kind of like a reverse etags -- you can query everyplace an identifier occurs (Including in the header files.) I was worried that I'd have to grab the C grammar off the net and write one of my own Real Soon Now.

Now all we need is lint...

Re:Kick Ass!

[crush]

What's wrong with LClint?

Tcl/Tk

[crush]

This is bound to start a flamewar of some sort, but it's a question that I've wondered about for a while and the nifty GUI to this inspires it: I've found that Tcl/Tk is great for whipping up interfaces to C code but I remember that there were a lot of hard words spoken about the licensing by RMS. Is there still considered to be a problem with this for Free projects? If so then what other routes do people take for easily-portable GUI'ed software? Python+mxWindows? Qt? Gtk? I don't really like the last two options because of what I perceive as the amount of work involved in becoming familiar with them, but perhaps I'm wrong?

<offtopic> Also, does anyone know how to get around the size limit using etags? < /offtopic >

Re:We will not accept this feeble stratagem.

[Zoltar]

**Of course they had to attack OpenSource way back when... **

I respectfully disagree. Instead of viewing it as competition they could have viewed it as free promotion for *nix and embraced it. Linux was the media darling. You couldn't click on a website without seeing Linux. That was the marketing opportunity of a lifetime. All they had to do was come out and pay lip service to Linux for a ton of free PR. They had to realize that people were going to try Linux regardless of what they said. Why shoot yourself in the foot?

I don't wish any ill-will on them but I think you will see them slowly go away (they already are) as Linux becomes more enterprise ready.

Also...this looks like a nifty tool, but it seems like they are just throwing us a bone. Come on guys, if you want to do something for the Linux community give us the good stuff :)