Re: open source tools

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2000 16:21:13 -0400, the world broke into rejoicing as
"Stuart Quimby" <address@hidden>  said:
> While these tool discussions are going around, I bumped into this site
> for the Wing IDE for Python :
> http://archaeopteryx.com/
> 
> You guys probably are already familiar with them, but I'm wondering if
> their license qualifies them as a possible gnue tool? No charge if you
> declare to them that development is for non-commercial purposes.

The problem with that is that there's an inherent ambiguity.

GnuE, "the project," may be a non-commercial project.

But GnuE, "a particular instance of an install of GnuE," is very likely
to be used for _very_ commercial purposes.  

The point of the exercise is to produce something usable to help manage
a commercial enterprise.

It would be possible to play the "game" whereby we pretend that GnuE
solely has role as the "product" of a non-commercial project.  That's
a little disingenous, as the only way it becomes _useful_ is if it is
put to a "commercial" purpose.

There's something of a semantic game there.  I think it takes more 
"gamesmanship" to claim that GnuE is _non_commercial than it does to
consider that GnuE _is_ commercial in nature...
--
address@hidden - <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/>
Rules of the Evil Overlord #215. "If I ever MUST put a digital timer
on my doomsday device, I will buy one free from quantum mechanical
anomalies. So many brands on the market keep perfectly good time
while you're looking at them, but whenever you turn away for a couple
minutes then turn back, you find that the countdown has progressed by
only a few seconds." <http://www.eviloverlord.com/>