RE: Open Source

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Jonathan" == Jonathan Shore <jshore@example.com> writes:

    Jonathan> If I provide something as open source I want to be able
    Jonathan> to provide the following:

OK.  I sympathize strongly with release standards.

I would propose that your job posting (to a LUG or other open source
mailing list) include "We wish to maintain the highest standards for
any work we are associated with.  At this time, we cannot afford to
provide a high-quality published implementation, nor the support we
feel is appropriate.  Our intention is to release the code as open
source once the implementation of the features demanded by our
business is complete.  At that point, if resources do not permit us to
directly support it, we will solicit volunteers to document,
generalize, and maintain the code base."

Or something like that.  Developing a commitment that makes sense
both to you and in the context of open source may very well require
orders of magnitude more effort than developing the software itself,
though.  One possibility would be to assign the copyright back to the
contract programmer (possibly with a special clause so that you can
do anything you want with the code; note that FSF assignments do
exactly this---the original programmer can even create proprietary
variants based on FSF-copyright code).

Especially on a LUG mailing list, the kind of people you are likely to
attract will aim to be the volunteer at the end, and collect $200 as
they pass Go.  (That would be the theory, anyway.  I know that all of
the money I have made from open source has been payment for work I
would have been happy to do as a volunteer, though not in the
requisite time frame.)

    Jonathan> There may be 5 other people in the world who might be
    Jonathan> able to use it as is - if they even understood what they
    Jonathan> are looking at.  It is really *that* specialized.  The
    Jonathan> specialization is such that personal users would not
    Jonathan> have the context (hardware & purpose) to find this
    Jonathan> useful.

*chortle*

If so, this is our bad, but ...

...go back and look at your original post.  Your first project
explicitly requested creation of a list of mime/types to plug-in
mappings, mentioning what AFAIK are publically available (possibly
only as binaries) plug-ins.  If that's not generally useful to Mozilla
users, I can't imagine what _would_ be.  ;-)  Ditto Java applets.

These would be major, major improvements to mozilla functionality,
especially if they were done in un-mozilla-like bullet-proof code.

Can you blame us for drooling?

And even if the particular plug-ins mostly weren't publically
available, do you realize how many half-baked programmers are out
there who would add mime/types to a list if there was only one to
extend, but can't even spell "RFC", let alone get up the energy to
find RFC 204[5-9] on a web site somewhere?

I think you are _seriously_ underestimating the amount of influence
even the smallest, most specialized pieces of code/config can have as
examples.  (No point in debating that, I don't have any data.  Just
expressing MHO.)

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