Servoy 5.2 Open Source
Published by admin on Sunday, May 9, 2010 - 21:16:07 - Filed under General, News, Announcements, Servoy
Yes, it’s official, the upcoming 5.2 version of the Servoy platform will be Open Source under the AGPL license.
But what does it mean exactly? Does it mean you will not have to pay for client licenses anymore (as my boss immediately believed when I announced it)?
Of course not! Open Source doesn’t necessarily mean Free!
Rather, you and I will have access to the Java sources of the developer and client, which will allow third parties to get a better understanding of the inner mechanism that drives such and such functionality, and it will ease the process of extending the platform, or patch it with bug fixes.
Does this mean that anyone will be able to do anything with the sources? Nah, although if you have an Open Source project you should be entitled to use the project and enhance it, provided that you Open Source your project too. The AGPL license being based on GPL, you project will have to be Open Source too if you want to freely use the product, otherwise, you will simply continue buying licenses for commercial development you do.
Open Source means access to the source, and as Jan said it in the Press release, it will benefit the worldwide Servoy community. The idea being:
- Vast expansion of the Servoy eco-space
- Increased developer interest
- More extensive options for developers to take control
- Community driven improvements
- Hotfixes can be executed and applied immediately
- Innovative ideas can be shared/tested around the product
That’s quite an ambitious program here, in any case really good news that they are moving towards it!
How I understand it, is that there will be a read-only access to the Servoy SVN repository, meaning that you will be able to build your own version of the platform, and if you find a bug or write an enhancement, you will be able to create a patch against that SVN version and submit it for review to Servoy. Then, depending on the pertinence of your patch, and the orientation that they want the ‘official’ version to follow, they will accept it or not in the SVN trunk. This is how it goes for most of the major platforms (Eclipse being one).
One thing that will be needed also to make this a real Open Source community, is an open support system with a voting system, which will allow every registered users of Servoy to have a say in what are the priorities. This works very well in Eclipse for example where you get a fixed set of votes (20) that you can use on bug fixes/feature requests, the more vote, the more priority a bug fix or feature enhancement will have. This voting system and open issue tracking is an essential part of building a community around a product, and I hope that they are not going to forget about it.
In any case, we will soon have the details of all this, let’s just say for now that there is good hope for an even wider community-driven Servoy platform!
Kudos for this to the Servoy team!
