@MikeGo read the GNU GPL -- mein kampf broken loose.
Stallman makes no attempt to hide his philosophical beliefs, which sadly were one of the roots of the hippie movement. Things do get interesting when you pull the tax records of the FSF, as Stallman is inarguably a hypocrite and quite capitalistic in nature. The FSF also routinely sues developers who use open source software in a way it doesn't like which in itself defacto makes the license a proprietary license which the FSF is supposed to be against.
Not true. There isn't a Windows BASIC forum on the net where John Spikowski hasn't yet tried to go on about how bad MS and its Windows is
Right now, MS and Windows have no greater supporter than John.
He is diligently working Somebody else is diligently working on implementing COM support into SB. Given that SB is cross-platform, this is detrimental to Linux as a whole. Like .NET, COM is Windows technology and should not be ported to Linux.
When the .NET initiative hit Windows, many of us old farts rebelled and dropped MS's programming languages because we did not follow the "bloat because you can" programming methodology that MS was moving to. Unfortunately, after .NET had been out a while, you had an organized and deliberate attack on Linux with people trying to bring the proprietary Windows technology known as .NET to Linux in the form of Mono. Windows developers, instead of learning how to properly develop for Linux, wanted to bring Windows technology with them and in doing so have changed Linux by bringing one of the most bloated Windows technologies to Linux. The marketing for Mono should be "Now Linux can suck just as much as Windows".
John also does not seem to fully believe in the open source principle as a whole. I had an interest in
John's Charles's C BASIC. However, John intentionally closed off the support forums for it and even before it was closed off, the membership requirements were such that people interested in the product were not eligible to join anyway. When somebody doesn't believe in their project enough to want to discuss it, support it and encourage exploration, you can't expect others to pick up the ball and want to play when you have let all the air out of the ball and put it away in the closet so nobody can play anymore.
Why do you think that Mike or Kuron or anybody else among your peers would ever need your advice on what their needs are and how they should go about their time and effort?
For me, the more disturbing aspect of this is John thinks IUP would be the right way to bring a cross-platform GUI to any platform. I do like IUP, even though it is not as well-established and as functional as WxWidgets. Perhaps it is just me and old age and not being able to teach an old dog new tricks, but both products are bloated beyond belief. Most of my development over the past few years is for a system where everything has to fit into 32K, because that is the total amount of static RAM available to the CPU for program storage and workspace. And it is eight processing cores sharing that same 32K. So, I don't like bloat. I look at how PureBasic has implemented its cross-platform GUI system. No bloat, small executables on each platform. I also look at MaxGUI which is what is used by BlitzMax. Again, a VERY nice cross-platform GUI, no bloat, tiny executable and MaxGUI is open source. I am NOT sure what the current license is, but it has bounced around to different open source licenses over the years and it a solid and reliable choice. Somebody who was wanting a cross-platform GUI, would have little issue taking MaxGUI and working it into a standalone cross-platform solution.
The mere presence of such people as Chris Boss, or Eros Olmi, or Petr Schreiber, or even your humble servant, to say nothing of many hundreds of regular albeit anonymous visitors on this site is already a very strong insentive towards the betterment of OxygenBasic as a product. And many thanks again to Charles for letting his code out in the Public Domain. But I repeat again -- it is his own voluntary and intelligent choice rather than a tribute to some questionable quality propaganda or Mao Tse-tung quote pads.
Although I got a kick in the teeth and a knife in the back for trying to help the first person in that list (who was a friend) try and bring his product to another language, I do agree with what you have said. However, with OxygenBasic, it is still in the very early stages and I am not sure Charles has fully decided where he is going to go with it. I have seen many changes since I have been following it and to me, it would seem highly rude to try and guide it in a direction the true author may not necessarily want to go. The old saying too many cooks spoil the broth certainly also applies to programming.
