(no subject)

[prog]

I think I've been slightly sick for several weeks. I've been stressing myself a lot since the beginning of April, and my body's been giving me some seriously mixed signals. My officemates have expressed concern about catching things from me, since it's not like their lives are exactly stress-free either.

I can't keep this up forever. But things are OK for now.

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It's been pointed out to me that I don't write about much other than work. Well, I write what I know, friends. I am more or less loving every minute of this, even when I'm hating it. Believe me.

There's other things to write about, and people to write to, and I've fallen way behind. I am sorry if you are one of them. Some day I will catch up.

I should really post something about Inform 7, which is absolutely fantastic. But I still don't feel that I've spent enough time with it yet. Coz, y'know, everything else.

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BTW, have always hated people who drawl on about how much work they do and how little time they have for reading and so on, clearly being self-congratulatory-via-self-pitying about it. If I start getting like that please slap me. It may be the life I'm leading these days but I'll be damned if I'm gonna make a lifestyle out of it.

Comments

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Right now, the license of Inform 7 (the compiler) is quasi-free; it doesn't allow modification (although Graham has stated that he's ok with patches) or commercial distribution. I just yesterday wrote to Graham Nelson to ask him to make Inform Free Software. I haven't heard back yet. You work with Zarf, who I guess knows Graham from the IF scene. Does Zarf know why Graham doesn't use a free license? Do you think it's likely that he could be convinced?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Question 1: Zarf sez that his primary motivation is a desire for personal ownership and control. His present policy is being happy to personally oversee the porting effort to any other platform that people might want to see the IDE & compiler on.

It seems natural to you or me to express control over a project by keeping it open, letting a hacker-community sprout around it, and keeping yourself at the central gatekeeper, but Graham has no history of operating this way.

Question 2: Dunno. He's very smart and friendly and will listen to what you say, but I think he is also very self-confident in his own decisions. Zarf notes that all the previous Informs have also been not-quite-free.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

It actually turns out that the IDEs are free (GPL), which is a good start.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

To clarify: Graham does not feel proprietary about his *code* (as far as I can tell) but he does want to keep control of I7 as a language.

I think he can do this without holding onto change-permission for the compiler source code. I've expressed this to him. He's gonna do what he decides to do, obviously.

As prog said, this model has worked well for I6.