Opinions sought: should I open source Auspex?

[timns]

As some of you may know, I wrote a text expander / replacer for NANY 2011. It was a bugger to write, and it seemed to polarise opinions from certain parties   but it achieved its goal. Certainly I use it literally the whole time so in that respect I guess it was worth the effort, and based on feedback from a fair number people, seems to be a reasonable example of this type of app.

But! Development has stalled - I do have a list of features I'd still like to implement, however at the moment I certainly don't have the time. I think it deserves some more attention, and has plenty of potential if it were actively developed further.

The project is written in Delphi and I would open all sources except the keyboard hook which will remain available only as a dll.

What do you reckon, folks? Anyone up for wading in there?

And if so, what sort of license model would work for this? I don't want some clod lifting the source code, re-badging and selling it on.

[Renegade]

I'm not sure what your goals are, but it seems to me that the GPL is the right way to go for what you've described.

Since you still retain copyright, you can do whatever you want, but with a GPL license for everyone else, nobody can legitimately lift it and repackage it without passing on those  same rights from the GPL.

I don't program in Delphi (hated Pascal in university), but I would probably be interested in looking at it simply for interest and to learn a bit.

[justice]

Is there an existing community that will pick up development? From what I've read, you will simply spend the time stimulating the community around your project instead of developing otherwise.
Just open sourcing a project doesn't make it active.

What about giving yourself an incentive to develop it by making it a commercial product?

[wraith808]

Is there an existing community that will pick up development? From what I've read, you will simply spend the time stimulating the community around your project instead of developing otherwise.
Just open sourcing a project doesn't make it active.

What about giving yourself an incentive to develop it by making it a commercial product?

-justice (April 05, 2012, 04:17 AM)

This.  Or actively solicit help from other parties before you attempt to open source it.

[timns]

Imteresting comments - and food for thought. Thanks all.

[mitzevo]

  @ "bugger to write"

[Jimdoria]

I was wondering if this means you're stepping away from development of Auspex.

I was in the other thread where the last comment is about a year old. There's a fairly minor bug that I was hoping to get on the radar to be fixed in an upcoming release.

I just discovered Auspex and I've really been enjoying it! Seems like I'm always late to these parties. :-P Will there be a next release? Any idea when?

[timns]

What was the bug? I can still fix stuff if it's stopping you from getting good use from the program

[Jimdoria]

Every time I restart my PC, it resets the colors used for the popup text tips - and it resets them to black text, black background! For both selected and unselected. So if I forget to change it, I get little black boxes popping up as I type.

I've tried setting the values, exiting out of Auspex & re-running it, but the result is the same - black on black popups.

Not sure where it stores these settings, why it is forgetting them or why it is using default values that make the popups useless. I'm just hoping I can get away form having to reset the colors every time I reboot.

[timns]

Every time I restart my PC, it resets the colors used for the popup text tips - and it resets them to black text, black background! For both selected and unselected. So if I forget to change it, I get little black boxes popping up as I type.

I've tried setting the values, exiting out of Auspex & re-running it, but the result is the same - black on black popups.

Not sure where it stores these settings, why it is forgetting them or why it is using default values that make the popups useless. I'm just hoping I can get away form having to reset the colors every time I reboot.

-Jimdoria (May 10, 2012, 09:19 AM)

That'll be Auspex unable to save its colors to disk for some reason. Can you try 'run as administrator' to see if that solves the issue?

The default color combo should be black text on white, so it's very odd that you get black on black in any case. I'll change the defaults slightly and do a new release on the weekend.

[Jimdoria]

I tried running it as administrator, making my changes, exiting and re-running. That didn't work.
I tried Windows 7's Compatibility wizard, doing the same thing. Also didn't work.
Black on black always comes up when I run the program.

Is this stored in the registry somewhere? Couldn't find an entry for it under HKCU/Software...

[timns]

Have a look in your local appdata folder, in Options.xml

(My path, e.g. is: C:\Users\Tim\AppData\Local\Auspex)

You should see 4 colour entries - see what they are, and you can probably replace them with the following to get something usable:

popuptextcolour="0"
popuptextselectedcolour="16777215"
popupbackgroundcolour="16777215"
popupbackgroundselectedcolour="9583041"

That's white popup with black text, but then the selected replacement is white text on purple-ish background

[Jimdoria]

My file looks much like that, except that the color values are negative:

popuptextcolour="0"
popuptextselectedcolour="0"
popupbackgroundcolour="-16777192"
popupbackgroundselectedcolour="-16777214"

I'm using system colors from the dropdown when selecting my colors.
(Specifically "ActiveCaption" and "InfoBk".)

Funny thing is the black shows up even when the values in the Options file have not changed. I'm not seeing them get reset to "0" when I exit Auspex or re-open it.

Could it be reading the negative values and just seeing them as zero?

[timns]

It sure could be. I just uploaded a new version  - please try 'er out and let me know.

[Jimdoria]

Looks like that did the trick! Muchos gracias!

[timns]

  great to hear. Anything else you'd like to see?

[kyrathaba]

I love seeing this sort of thing. This is what makes DC so great (one of the things, anyway): someone has a slight problem with a months-old app, and lo and behold, the developer is still around, and willing to fix it!

Kudos to you, timns!

[f0dder]

The project is written in Delphi and I would open all sources except the keyboard hook which will remain available only as a dll.

-timns (April 04, 2012, 03:36 PM)

What's the reason for that?

And if so, what sort of license model would work for this? I don't want some clod lifting the source code, re-badging and selling it on.

-timns (April 04, 2012, 03:36 PM)

Most open-source licenses don't really stop people from doing this - and even if they technically did, good luck enforcing it when you have a relatively small and unknown product. I think there's a lot of DC'ers that can remember a particular GPL ripoff happening here...

[timns]

Well! Thank you for those kind words 

[40hz]

Seriously, why exactly would you want to open source Auspex? If it's for any reason other than to turn it over gratis "to all mankind" then don't do it.

I'm big on open source and the concepts and philosophy behind it. But I'm also a card carrying child of the 70s so my political and moral values reflect that - and, quite frankly, may not be as relevant to today's realities as they once were. Especially when it comes to computing and software.

One problem may also be it's written in Delphi. I don't know what sort of license goes with Delphi, but there may (or probably are) terms in Delphi's license that precludes you making it "open." As the FSF often reminds people, there's nothing in the GPL that overrides any other license terms you may be under as a developer. Which is why they try to keep the "tool chain" squarely within the realm of the GPL as much as possible - to avoid any issues down the road.

Best suggestion I could offer would be to find somebody who may be willing to take your project over,  work out your own deal or license with them, and forget about open sourcing it.

And if you ultimately do decide to "go open" with it (and Delphi's license allows you to), make it a point to assign ownership of your code to the Free Software Foundation. At least if you want to have any hopes an open license will be enforceable on it. As f0dder pointed out, a software license is only as good as your ability to enforce it is. Without a champion in your corner you, as an individual, have little hope of doing that.
 

[wraith808]

One problem may also be it's written in Delphi. I don't know what sort of license goes with Delphi, but there may (or probably are) terms in Delphi's license that precludes you making it "open."

-40hz (August 09, 2012, 01:14 PM)

No, there isn't anything there.  There are many FOSS projects using Delphi.

Context,an excellent text Editor more efficient than NotePad++ for very large files.
AxBase,a MDB (and ADO) database front end.
PyScripter, a well known Python IDE.
HeidiSQL, a MySQL Frontend
osFinancials, Accounting Software
dxbx, a port of cxbx which is an xbox emulator for the pc
StarUML, Dev-PHP, Dev-C++, XanaNews, SynWrite, and many more.

[40hz]

^Thx Wraith! Learn something new every day.