Comment by an_d_rew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by an_d_rew | Hacker News Reader

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Sadly, I’ve been bitten by this before, too, and even if I love the product, I stay away.

It isn’t that I don’t trust you or your intentions now, it’s that intentions (and requirements) change.

You asked about allaying fears. Personally for me this means actually take-to-the-bank licensing that I could get through a legal audit, even if hypothetical.

Talk of “secret sauce” and future closed source and IP licensing of future maybe-must-have magic... that’s way too much future risk for me.

An example of what I think is good licensing is JUCE (https://juce.com). Everything from “free” to “paid with support”, all open source… but the point is I always know exactly where I stand legally, what I can and cannot do... and what I can and cannot do in the FUTURE.

Well, as the person who also created JUCE and its license, I can't really argue with that. :)

We're very keen to make sure that the end-user developers are totally unencumbered and license-free, because we want lots of people to adopt it.

All our licensing is more aimed at device and driver builders - think of it like e.g. openGL - the industry making GL cards and drivers is legal complex, but none of that stuff affects the coders writing GL apps.

What if I want to write a software renderer that implements the openGL api?

Or what if want to write a Vulkan to Metal like MoltenVK?

What if I want to write an interpreter for your bitcode?

What if I want to port soul secret source on top of Apple's Accelerate framework? Would you sue me to oblivion?

The license is pretty clear, you can do anything you like with the language and the software that has been open sourced. If you want to write your own renderer, that's great! If you want to write a decent interpreter, or a rubbish one for that matter, again, that's great, that's your business.

Ah! I didn’t realize it was you! :-) Cheers!

And good point. I understand where you’re coming from, but... I didn’t understand it when I read the post and blurb(s).

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