It doesn't help that their leader is so closed minded, and lives in LALA land. I would try out your IDE yan, but my Distro is an old Knoppix Boot CD that I use to play around in KDE, and I don't know how to code anything in Linux. [depressed]

CLICKY

Quote: Non-Free Software:
JA: What is your reaction to tools such as gcc, gdb and GNU Emacs being used for the development of non-free software?

Richard Stallman: Any development of non-free software is harmful and unfortunate, whether it uses GNU tools or other tools. Whether it is good or bad, in the long term, for the future of computer users' freedom that one can use these tools to develop non-free software is a question whose answer I could only guess at.

JA: How do you react to the opinion that non-free software is justified as a means for raising dollars that can then be put into the development of completely new software, money that otherwise may not have been available, and thus creating software that may have never been developed?

Richard Stallman: This is no justification at all. A non-free program systematically denies the users the freedom to cooperate; it is the basis of an antisocial scheme to dominate people. The program is available lawfully only to those who will surrender their freedom. That's not a contribution to society, it's a social problem. It is better to develop no software than to develop non-free software.

So if you find yourself in that situation, please don't follow that path. Please don't write the non-free program--please do something else instead. We can wait till someone else has the chance to develop a free program to do the same job.

JA: What about the programmers...

Richard Stallman: What about them? The programmers writing non-free software? They are doing something antisocial. They should get some other job.

JA: Such as?

Richard Stallman: There are thousands of different jobs people can have in society without developing non-free software. You can even be a programmer. Most paid programmers are developing custom software--only a small fraction are developing non-free software. The small fraction of proprietary software jobs are not hard to avoid.

JA: What is the distinction there?

Richard Stallman: Non-free software is meant to be distributed to the public. Custom software is meant to be used by one client. There's no ethical problem with custom software as long as you're respecting your client's freedom.

Some more random thoughts before sleep.

This is of course your project and you're naturally free to do what you wish with it but for god's sakes don't enforce using autotools. Even a handful of GNU zealots recognize that the damned things need to go.

I am using MinGW right now which is a somewhat popular ("somewhat" because it's not too good) free linux IDE that is closed source.

DO NOT underestimate the power of word of mouth. There are very few good products in this area (if any, I am yet to find a good one) and lots of developers are looking for a good tool all the time. Let people know about it and if your IDE is any good it'll explode in popularity.

Aside from posting about it here, Gentoo community is very nice and isn't overly GNUish. Post there in Off The Wall (gentoo forums) and let people take a look. Again, if it's any good your userbase will explode.

I was going to post it to GDNet anyway, but a little later, when it is actually usable for real world projects. I realize there are quite some Linux developer here, but this is a game developement site after all, so it didn't seem really appropriate to post something about an IDE. OTOH, it's hard to make a game without an IDE (yeah, yeah, I know, vi and xterm...) ;)

Hosting is not the problem, I was just looking for a place with open minded Linux developers - not that easy to find, I guess.

And yes, the IDE is definitely targeted at Windows users wishing to migrate or cross develop on Linux. There are some tools available, but they are either based on old and obsolete Linux concepts such as auto tools (KDevelop, Anjuta), they are minimalist (MingW Developer Studio) or incredible bloat (Eclipse). We tried to find a middle ground, something fast and efficient. Not as powerfull as MSVC, and not as platform independent as Eclipse, but something with all the features a Windows developer would also expect under Linux.

Oh well. I'm going to post a couple of screenshots tomorrow, and an updated alpha version for the weekend, so everybody can test it. I guess testing it with a smaller, yet technically competent crowd is probably better anyway.

Quote:
Btw, when you mentioned that it has "native support for cross compiling", is that feature implemented right now? And if so, what languages and OS's would that be for? I was just wondering.

Yes, it's implemented for a good part. Currently, there is native support for C, C++, ASM, and Python. You can add any language you want with a few clicks on the GUI. The OS support depends on the compiler/linker you use.

Quote:
This is of course your project and you're naturally free to do what you wish with it but for god's sakes don't enforce using autotools.

I hate auto tools :) The IDE was specifically designed with this in mind. It uses a custom make system and dependency tracker for highly efficient internal builds, but can export standard GNU makefiles on request (much like MingW).

Quote: Original post by CoffeeMug
This is of course your project and you're naturally free to do what you wish with it but for god's sakes don't enforce using autotools. Even a handful of GNU zealots recognize that the damned things need to go.

Quote: Original post by Yann L
"It doesn't use autotools ? Everything that doesn't work with autotools is crap. It won't even compile on my <insert exotic Unix variant here>"

Hrm. Well, maybe I missed something but it sounds like Yann's IDE will not use autotools.

Edit: A bit too late.

After (a while ago) working in a company full of linux GPL weenies for a year and a half, I feel your pain. Every time I said 'hey look at this cool new thing I did' their response was either (a) give me the source, you have no right to keep it to yourself, or (b) why isn't it under GPL (ie. basically (a)). This kind of thing put me off linux development pretty much permanently... well, that and the lack of standardisation. Write once, and you can run on pretty much any windows from 98 onwards, unless you use some arcane libs (or .net, in which case you've still got a 90% chance of any random computer being able to run it).

I have no problem with the GPL as such, just with the Stallmanettes who insist they have the 'right' to everything I create.

While I'm ranting about linux - the reason I don't use it as my desktop OS at home is that my computer exists to let me do things - play games, write code, browse the intarweb. It's not the goal in and of itself, and as such it should consume as little as possible of my time and energy, which could otherwise be spent doing fun and constructive things.

[edit in response to Vampyre_Dark's post (warning: contains nonpositive opinion of Richard Stallman): Evpuneq Fgnyyzna vf n shpxva vqvbg naq arrqf gb fcraq fbzr gvzr ba gur qbyr, be jbexvat nf n Onatynqrfuv crnfnag, orsber fnlvat 'ab fbsgjner vf orggre guna abaserr fbsgjner'.]

Quote: Original post by Doc
On the other hand, I probably wouldn't use your IDE either. It's significantly the share-and-share-alike philosophy that so permeates Linux et al, and I would much rather see work done to improve something like KDevelop than to create a new system that has little advantages in the majority of applications compared to what's already available, and the disadvantage that, by being closed-source, community involvement is significantly limited compared to some other systems. :/

It's a prototype. It's quite possible that Yann and his boss are not in the least bit averse to OSI-approved licenses, but just don't have to time to make it conformant with one right now, and figure that getting actual user feedback is more important (I know, I know, shocking that using software could ever be considered more important than deliberating over its innards). For all we know, with support and good feedback, they could gradually move it toward an open source release by eliminating the proprietary dependencies, but that's not likely to happen if nobody gives it a chance "because it's not open source."

Furthermore, contributing to projects like KDevelop et al is only cost-effective if you subscribe to its philosophy. Clearly, both Yann and his boss have tried a bunch of Linux IDES and think they're not up to snuff, so they wrote their own. If that's not the spirit of open source and "choice," then I don't know what is. Changing the culture and direction of entrenched projects like KDevelop is virtually impossible; these projects are less about software than about ideology (what does vi vs emacs come down to? GNOME vs KDE? Gtk vs Qt/Linux?)

And this, children, is the greatest threat to open source. Not "Micro$oft," not co-optation by IBM, not SCO's legal challenge of the GPL. No, the greatest threat to open source is pig-headed religion, the exact same sort that originally created the schism between "Free Software" and "Open Source."

@Yann L:
Nice work. Put it up on some web space and announce it on Freshmeat.Net (which only prefers open source, but doesn't mandate it). Also see if you can announce it on Linux Journal.

Quote: Original post by Vampyre_Dark
It doesn't help that their leader is so closed minded, and lives in LALA land.

Stallman is hardly the leader. An important figure, but no leader. Many people in the community agree that some of his views are pretty out-there.

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi
@Yann L:
Nice work. Put it up on some web space and announce it on Freshmeat.Net (which only prefers open source, but doesn't mandate it). Also see if you can announce it on Linux Journal.

I was just going to suggest FM. They don't care whether or not it's OSS, free, etc. As long as it works on Linux (and it's even remotely useful) they'll post it.

As for the Linux community in general, yes, I don't like those zealots, but if you do a good job they will eventually come to you and ask for your permission to include it in their distros.
BTW, did you consider making the code OSS, with the exception of your 'secret' libs?

Good points, Olu.

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi
It's a prototype. It's quite possible that Yann and his boss are not in the least bit averse to OSI-approved licenses, but just don't have to time to make it conformant with one right now, and figure that getting actual user feedback is more important (I know, I know, shocking that using software could ever be considered more important than deliberating over its innards). For all we know, with support and good feedback, they could gradually move it toward an open source release by eliminating the proprietary dependencies, but that's not likely to happen if nobody gives it a chance "because it's not open source."

I am actually a big proponent of Open Source. Freedom is always a good thing, but you cannot force freedom onto someone. There are unfortunately always people that take things too far, and become too fundamentalist with their views (oh the parallels to real life...) Yes, our current priority is to make it work. We do that for fun, we're not getting paid for it, so we'd like to see the reaction of the public before spending too much time on it.

Quote:
And this, children, is the greatest threat to open source. Not "Micro$oft," not co-optation by IBM, not SCO's legal challenge of the GPL. No, the greatest threat to open source is pig-headed religion, the exact same sort that originally created the schism between "Free Software" and "Open Source."

Word.

Quote:
BTW, did you consider making the code OSS, with the exception of your 'secret' libs?

They're not really secret, they just can't be release in source, because they are part of our commercial 3D applications. We're using proprietary libraries right now, because we have them here, it allows us to rapidly deploy a working system, and we're used to them. We might rewrite the relevant parts later on, making the whole thing really OSS, but I hate being forced to do this right now (and don't have the time anyway).