OSS (was Re: Stand Alone Erlang)

[klacke@REDACTED]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 10:34:42AM +0100, Ulf Wiger wrote:


> - that we first have to replace all copyright lingo in the source;

Easy,

> - that we have to rewrite/reformat the documentation;

Easy,


> - that our design environment is different enough frin e.g.
>   sourceforge that we have to duplicate the code and maintain
>   two separate versions;


Hard, we're doing this now. Basically the revision control problem
is to have code in 2 different CVS systems and sync them.
Not trivial, or even hard.


> - that accessing sourceforge CVS from our workstations is ridiculously
>   difficult due to security policy.


Well, that sounds like a bug :-(

> 
> I'd like to see our design environments set up so that it's easy
> to release choice parts as OSS and still keep one code base.
> OTP has done this, and it seems to work very well for them. Of course,
> they don't have proprietary parts, but release everything as OSS.
> Mixing proprietary and OSS is perhaps a bit trickier...

Much, but a necessary evil if you want to contribute some
parts of your system that you find interesting to the public.


Finally, I think that by selecting a part of your system and
making that part open source, may actually improve things. It will
cast the interfaces to that part in iron. It will make the parts 
of your proprietary system that interface the OSS part cleaner, since
it will use a clear interface. 
Otherwise in largish systems, everybody gets to call() everybody
and system becomes a mess. If there at least are a couple  of core
interfaces, ... well, it improves.


/klacke


-- 
Claes Wikstrom                        -- Caps lock is nowhere and
http://www.hyber.org                  -- everything is under control