Source code availability of plugins

[ReverseEngineered]

To all plugin developers,

As you may have heard, we are planning a major restructuring of Smartie's API. This will allow us to give plugins more control, and avoid the ugly hack which originally was the $dll command.

While we do plan on building in some backwards compatiability, we would like to be able to quickly move all plugins over to this new interface.

Since many plugins rely on interfacing to shared memory or other interfaces of external software which are constantly evolving, so too will the plugins in order to take advantage of the latest data available to them.

Both of these are reasons why I am asking that all plugin developers consider making their code available as open source.

By doing so, you are ensuring that everybody can use your plugin, and that our development team can make updates in the event that bugs are found or new features are requested. There are many plugins that we use on a regular basis that suffer from these problems, and there is no way for us to fix them except to rewrite them from scratch, because the original authors are gone and no source code was ever provided.

If you are a developer who has made any plugins in the past, please consider releasing your source code under the GPLv2 (the same license used by Smartie and a large portion of the open source community). This will allow us to include them as part of our project, perhaps even distributing them with every copy of Smartie.

Unless you had to sign an NDA, or are planning on selling your plugin in the future, there's no reason not to adopt an open source license, and the advantages to doing so are numerous to both the LCD Smartie project, and our users.


Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I hope you will help us make Smartie a better experience for everybody by adopting an open source license for your plugins.

[mattcro]

Hear, hear! Mods, this post should be a sticky.

I'm keeping to this policy (for the little I've done so far) and I hope others will too - it's often very instructive for new programmers to see how things are done and get ideas.