[sword-devel] My personal OpenSource ideologies

[Mike Dougherty]

I'm not going to debate anyone's specific views on Open Source and/or
Java development. I'll just put to you all what I think and you can take
it for what it's worth.

I am an Open Source advocate. I am not a good evangelist, with either
truth that I believe (The Gospel of Christ and Open Source for those
that may not have put that together). But I believe whole heartedly in
both and desire to use the talents, skills, and gifts available to me to
further them. 

I also have thoughts and opinions on the roles, as I see them, for Open
Source and commercial software in the future. But this is probably not
the right place to share them now.

In regards to JGL. I do not think we should use this library. I have not
read any compelling reason why JSword should be tied to a library that
seems to be questionable at best. As I read the license, I wasn't even
sure we could distribute it with JSword without obtaining permission to
do so from ObjectSpace. I also got the impression that Crosswire might
be in violation of the license by hosting the help and api documentation
on its web site. But I am not a lawyer so I may not have understood it
correctly.

I would also like to raise a point about the project and its Java
implementation specifically. While I agree (for the most part) that the
Java API should remain as close to the original C++ API as possible (at
least where it doesn't conflict with Java conventions or standards), I
do NOT agree that the implementation should be mimicked. Java and C++ do
things in a different way. To the best of my knowledge there is no way
to directly port the code from one language to another. That is why I am
trying to understand the C++ library, what it does and its intention,
not just modifying the syntax so that it will compile with the Java
compiler. I mention this because maybe it was important and necessary to
use STL (BTW, what is that?) for C++, but it may not be necessary for
Java. It may have been necessary to use a Multimap in C++ which may not
be necessary in Java (I have already posed one possible solution to this
challenge). This is the way I plan to code and contribute, anyway.


Just my opinion,
/mike



-- 
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 Mike Dougherty -- Java Software Engineer
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