Architel Overlords Rule!
Satadru noted that he “welcomed the new Architel overlords” in a comment responding to disgruntled open source people. The overlords welcome you , Satadru! The real subject of this post is Defining the Terms.
I think the main problem is that Peter and Kate misunderstand what open source means (or what we think it means). I think Kate makes it clear that her definition of open source is different than ours when she says, “I may have issues with Architel’s handling of the initial project and the fact that the keep promoting the Open Source aspects of project when I can’t seem to find anything “openâ€? about the current version”
Our understanding of open source is far different than that of Kate. We think the definition of open source is, “software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees.” Kate would disagree and suggest that “open source code evolves through community cooperation.” Community development is in fact how many projects evolve, but certainly not how they start.
Imagine trying to build software for ten different people with ten different specific needs. Now realize that the needs of 2 of the people would make the software useless for the other 8. How could you agree on what to write? Who is in charge? In the case of SimpleTicket we are building it for us. We made our project open so that others could a) use our code and contribute back bug fixes and needed features or b) use our code as a basis to build something that worked for them. Had we relied on Kate or Peter to build SimpleTicket it would not be very useful to our company.
We decided to release version one as an open source project and we plan to release version two as well. Perhaps version three will develop with the help of the a community? Or perhaps the community will simply extend the second version for the benefit of everyone… We shall see.
