The plan is to release as open source in due course. Why not now? because some of the code is not really public-ready, and it's part of a much larger suite of open source software that is not yet finished. We had a deadline to meet for this part, so we exposed parts of the API publicly that we know we can support and won't break in future releases. Those parts that are not public we are still free to change (in a compatible way of course).
Another smaller part of the reasoning is that the larger suite of software that this is part of has likely very wide commercial application, but we also want to be able to take advantage of that ourselves. In other words why would we give away all our crown jewels and let others make money off of our (very considerable) efforts before we can? It's compromising between being philanthropic and not letting yourself get shafted. What would you do? The gradient panel is the type of thing that will help leverage the larger suite by making standard data types available across a range of applications (assuming it is adopted - we know of some developers who are already working on this), so we do want to encourage that. In other words it's about gaining traction and support.
That all said we are fully commited to supporting and maintaining this product as it stands - you can take our word for it. Those who know my track record (with MacZoop, et. al.) would vouch for my commitment to the developer community.
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Nice UI but... - Graham_Cox_727
The plan is to release as open source in due course. Why not now? because some of the code is not really public-ready, and it's part of a much larger suite of open source software that is not yet finished. We had a deadline to meet for this part, so we exposed parts of the API publicly that we know we can support and won't break in future releases. Those parts that are not public we are still free to change (in a compatible way of course).Another smaller part of the reasoning is that the larger suite of software that this is part of has likely very wide commercial application, but we also want to be able to take advantage of that ourselves. In other words why would we give away all our crown jewels and let others make money off of our (very considerable) efforts before we can? It's compromising between being philanthropic and not letting yourself get shafted. What would you do? The gradient panel is the type of thing that will help leverage the larger suite by making standard data types available across a range of applications (assuming it is adopted - we know of some developers who are already working on this), so we do want to encourage that. In other words it's about gaining traction and support.
That all said we are fully commited to supporting and maintaining this product as it stands - you can take our word for it. Those who know my track record (with MacZoop, et. al.) would vouch for my commitment to the developer community.
-Graham Cox, one of Gradient Panel's developers
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Wednesday, May 23 2007 @ 05:18 PM PDT