On Sun, 28 Nov 2004, Jon Phillips wrote:
On Sat, 2004-11-27 at 22:59 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
If they say no to that usage, ask if they'd have any problem if we were to clone/reimplement it in C++ for Inkscape, without using their code directly.
Well, if you look on the site, the app. is all in JAVA!!! Maybe there is a C or C++ OSS framework or smil editor already. We don't wanna add JAVA into our codebase do we?
Yes, but a few thoughts on that:
If they are willing to cooperate closely with us, and can do GPL and be willing to change to integrate with Inkscape, that may be the best case situation - they'd have the responsibility for maintaining and developing that section of code, yet we'd be able to fully benefit from it. If they're maintaining it and it works well with Inkscape, then the language it's written in may not be that big of a deal to us.
On the other hand, if they're willing to let us use it under GPL but are not willing to do anything particular to help us, we still benefit. It's been my experience in the past that translating an application from one language to another requires a fraction of the work that creating it from scratch does. _Especially_ Java->C++ or vice versa. Most of the trouble would be replacing libs.
If they're not willing to provide GPL licensing and won't be adapting it for Inkscape's use, we can still lift ideas from it.
Bryce