On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 01:37:44PM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
Help, Modifying and Redistributing Inkscape. :( must resist urge to kill
Not my area - Peter, can you comment?
It is cruft, an unnecessary distraction. I would really like to see this bit of marketing propoganda removed entirely from the user interface. It will probably need to be mentioned in the documentation anyway but the license is important to Free Software Evangelists not to users who want to draw stuff. Distributors should read the Licensing information, users shouldn't need to worry about it and windows users have already been required to agree to the License in the installer. (And users do not need to agree to the GPL just to use the software, only if they wish to redistribute modified versions.)
This particularly hit a nerve because the GIMP harasses users with inane questions the first time you run it, including displaying the License. There are better places for evanglism than this.
And to have a menu label steal the promiment position at the end of the list and then to have a five word label is not at all aesthetically pleasing to put it politely. (Sorry the more I do this the more hypersensative I get to these anomolies.)
I was also a bit curious when I saw this added to the help menu. It might be better to simply call it "License"?
I know that at least one user has asked for licensing terms for usage, so it's not ONLY good for evangelism purposes. Also, given that nearly every application out there bugs the user with the licensing terms on installation or at start up, I think having it just be a link somewhere in one of the menus is not too obtrusive.
On the other hand, I do see a point that from a user perspective it's probably not a very important link. Perhaps if the end of the list is a prominent position, it could move to mid-list.
Bryce
P.S., Alan, if you ever do get interested in hacking code, I'd encourage you to check out the menu code first; it's pretty simple code as far as code goes, and it sounds like you put as much thought into menu positioning, etc. as Bulia does into keyboard shortcuts. :-)