E Text Editor: Releasing the Source

http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/releasing-the-source

by bdfh42 • 17 years ago

51 22 17 years ago

eli4• 17 years ago

That's a very curious license.

So you have all the source, but if you build something based on it, only licensed owners of E can use it?

edit: I take it back, you do not appear to get the source to ecore.lib, which appears to contain licensing code and perhaps other things.

rufo• 17 years ago

Yet, there's nothing in the license keeping you from downloading it, removing the license code yourself, and running it registration-free. (Your personal sense of morality may differ, I suppose.)

For curiosity's sake, what would be the legality of a patch to remove said licensing code from the code?

eli4• 17 years ago

I'd worry it might run afoul of the DMCA since it would be a tool for removing copyright protection

Zev• 17 years ago

Probably (Not a lawyer, etc) legal. There's versions of XChat for Windows that are built from the source and have no differences besides the licensing code stripped out of it.

sammcd• 17 years ago

I was considering doing this same type thing with one of my mac applications. My thought was, if they download it, remove the registration, and get it going without a license, at least they have the source on their computer and familiarity with it. The possible will make a good contributor. I was also thinking about creating a "developer license".

jrockway2• 17 years ago

DJB says patches are always legal:

http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html

decode• 17 years ago

Here's the explanation of why the license is the way it is, and why the code is only partially open:

http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/opencompany

eli4• 17 years ago

Actual link to source: http://github.com/etexteditor/e/tree/master

jballanc• 17 years ago

Their "Open Company" concept is rather interesting too. Almost a sort of e-Kibbutz.

avinashv• 17 years ago

I remember trying this editor out when I was looking for something good on Windows before I switched to using Vim. It was well thought-out; very TextMate-like.

How does this not completely kill their business? Are they really expecting everyone to pay? Or is there only partial openness to the source?

edit: Just saw eli's comment that the core is in fact closed.

sr3d• 17 years ago

I love E. In a way, with the split screen editing, it's even better than Textmate. For windows users, E is one of the best editors out there. Releasing E's source is an awesome move!

gojomo3• 17 years ago

Edit: I initially misidentified the project-specialized clause as the key new clause; my text below has been expanded and corrected. I thank almost and artost for their corrections below.

This project's eccentric worries don't justify the license proliferation.

The new elastic "do what I mean" clause -- "Any redistribution, in whole or in part, must retain full licensing functionality, without any attempt to change, obscure or in other ways circumvent its intent" -- just adds a new cognitive barrier to the easy participation and mixing with other projects that's usually the whole point of open source.

I also wonder if the new restriction is legally meaningful in any realistic situation. There was no right to arbitrarily relicense BSD code to circumvent its conditions before the addition.

Given that the essential conditions of the BSD license are attribution and non-endorsement, how does this new clause add anything but confusion?

Even in the absence of the updated wording, any marketing falsely implying a endorsement from the main project would be actionable under other principles. Even with the updated wording, is there cause of action against someone who, in their promotional materials, makes a factual statement about the origin of the code?

If so strictly enforced, the BSD license itself is almost self-contradictory: you must include a "Copyright (c) 2009, Alexander Stigsen, e-texteditor.com" in distributions and documentation... but you must not use his name or product name to "promote" your derived product. Can you achieve both of those when the distribution and documentation are themselves the primary "promotional" materials of a free work? Adding the new 'anticircumvention' wording only makes this worse; I wonder if a lawyer was even consulted in the redrafting.

And, it's not like the name "e-texteditor" or the names of the current or future contributors are marketing gold, anyway.

almost• 17 years ago

That's not the new clause, that's from the BSD license.

The new clause is the last one in the list, the one about not removing the license enforcement code.

gojomo3• 17 years ago

You're right; <strike>but they've even reworded that clause.</strike> I'm correcting my grandparent comment to reflect reality, with a note that it's been changed.

danielrhodes• 17 years ago

I have had a lurid history with E:

Basically this was the only program I could find which was similar in workflow to TextMate and provided in-program FTP/SVN support (with a few hacks).

However, the program was so poorly designed and so buggy that it made working extremely tedious and dysfunctional. It made me start thinking about how somebody could release a program so ridiculously buggy and what were the underlying reasons. While the programmer is the first obvious target, I realized that the Windows framework was probably to blame. It's not the framework itself, but the way it makes you code. It was hard for me to justify continuing to use such a flawed system, as it scared me to think that potentially all these ill effects may be rubbing off on me. As a result, I switched to Mac the next day.

Therefore, E texteditor made me lose enough faith in Windows and Windows programs, which I had been using since 3.1 (even using 1.0 at one point in 1995), that I switched my entire operating system. I haven't looked back since. It may have been coming anyways, but it was a good decision.

dchest• 17 years ago

While the programmer is the first obvious target, I realized that the Windows framework was probably to blame.

It's not the Windows framework, it's wxWidgets, an open-source cross-platform framework.

To be fair, though, it's been designed to be like MFC.

charlesroper• 17 years ago

Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience. Most users of E suffer from a few bugs because the developer likes to get release early and release often, so bugs often creep in, but they have mostly been fixed very quickly. I'm not sure why you should have had such problems. I've used E for a couple of years now and have only been troubled a couple of times; generally it's been very stable.

E Text Editor: Releasing the Source

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