Is MORE Open Source a Possibility?

Posted by davec on 8/12/1999
davec 8/12/1999 7:50 am
Since Symantec has ceased development of MORE and now made the binaries freely available (thank you--I'm glad I can resume recommending it, albeit with caveats), I wonder if there's any chance they would release the source code into the public domain? I don't believe that they have other products built on it or that they have competing commercial products, so it at least it seems in the realm of possibility. Of course there may be other factors, such as licensed code or libraries included in it, or licenses to others. Dave (Winer) can you shed any light on this?

.../dave
dave 8/12/1999 8:42 am
Here's the only light I can shed:

1. None of us here, as far as I know, has any power over this. So any discussion we have will be powerless ones. And I hate those kinds of discussions, they lead nowhere.

2. Further, it's not a gracious question to ask. It wouldn't have been raised if Symantec had not been generous in allowing the re-release of this software. On Ric Ford's page I read some comments that said that Symantec was a bad company. This is totally unfair.

3. Open source is very stylish right now, but there are limited resources in the open source world. Don't assume that people would galvanize around a source release. Also don't assume they would make you happy, that they would give you the features you want for free.

In any case, I chose to respond to this one message, to make it clear that this is not going to be a forum for asking for handouts or complaints about the software. As far as I know MORE 3.1 works well on Apple's current operating system. The question can be addressed when and if this becomes a problem, and part of the question should be directed to Apple.

If at some time Symantec chooses to fully divest of their ownership of MORE, we'll cross that road then. But right now, after having been so generous, I don't want to in any way put any pressure on them. Thanks for listening.