Thank you Yann for your insight.

(I also skipped the previous pages, no time)

I thought I'd say that Borland tried the same thing, and failed horribly, for the same reasons. They ported Delphi to Linux, IMHO the best IDE and RAD tool that exists for windows, though I'm probably biased since I do Delphi development for a living.

First they put up a public poll, "how much would you be willing to pay" and the slashdot crowd stormed the website and poll, pushing "free / nothing" up to something like 85% of the votes.

Of course Borland ignored this, and wisely so, and released Kylix with a reasonable pricetag in-line with their other development tools. It didn't sell enough to make a ripple anywhere and is for all intents and purposes dead.

I too am a FreeBSD fan, I don't like linux (too amaturish) or the GPL (too draconian/communist). I don't any development "on it" per se -- all development I do for that platform I do on windows, with UltraEdit32. There is an utter lack of good IDEs for *nix, as you've noticed, and I also do not like X11 at all and am not going to install it just to use a development tool.

That said, there are other communities you can join and look around, slashdot is the absolute bottom of the barrel. Many of the best and brightest from there have jumped ship to other sites, in addition to the many already existing BSD sites which are generally more professional and reasonable than the GPL crowd sites.

The FreeBSD Diary: www.freebsddiary.org
Kuro5hin : www.kuro5hin.org (originally by slashdot refugees)
Daemon News : www.daemonnews.org

There is also a great community of people at Experts Exchange, over at www.experts-exchange.com which is a sort of community-run helpdesk for all sorts of things. You post questions and put up a sort of "karma reward." When the answers come in, you award the points to the person(s) who helped you the most. There are incentives to gaining a certain number of points a month, and in addition you are able to post high-point questions to get answers to the tough stuff.. :)

Good luck on your project, it's really an indifferent-to-hostile environment for people coming from windows, which I've always found amusing considering how much (IMHO) better windows is as a desktop platform.

You may also wanna poke around for apple/mac sites, since that's BSD based now, but has a proprietary heritage, there are probably a lot of insights buried there.

Yann, your IDE is looking promising can't wait to use it. While we are waiting for it can you show us another screenshot or two demonstrating maybe the menus and the different options? Thanks.

@Yann L:

I am at the university of erlangen right now

i could give you the email of one of my professors maybe they would test it

everything here works with linux so i think you had good chances here

Coming late to this thread :-)

Anyway, neat program (judging from the screenshot) and thank you for making it as free as possible ( don't care about hypocritic open source fanatics, they all still use their flash-plugin, precompiled java (i know you can get the source of that one but its not exactly GPL) and some windows codecs :-P )

Hope I'm not asking for too much, but a binary version compiled for freebsd 5.3 would rock :-)

If you need alpha / beta testers, i would not mind potentially screwing up my gnome install on a slackware 10 system...

Same for me, I'd like to test. My Linux installation is currently doing nothing because of the lack of a good Visual C++ like dev environment, so that would be a reason to screw it up to test yours :)

Quote: Original post by _the_phantom_

I dont see why 'selling' crushes the hopes of linux? Unless free software is that bad that you think that as soon as commerical software you have to pay for gets on the scene everyone will jump ship to that? [smile]
Infact, the introduction of commericalism is what could save it and push it on, as commerical apps tend to demand more uniform libraries and install systems, making it easier for the end user and making linux easier makes it more accasible (sp?) and in theory more popular ("hey, have you tried linux? yeah, its as easy to use as windows and has lots of free software!"), thus pushing it on wards.
Unless ofcourse by 'the hopes of linux' you mean keeping it in the server room only and on a tiny market share of desktops? [grin]

Quote: from the GPL license itself

...

1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's
source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you
conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate
copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the
notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty;
and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License
along with the Program.

You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and
you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.

...

2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices
stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.

b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.

c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively
when run, you must cause it, when started running for such
interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an
announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a
notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide
a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under
these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this
License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on
the Program is not required to print an announcement.)

...

And from the Free Software Foundation itself:

Quote: from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

So being commercial software does not mean that it cannot be open source or free software. A lot of people complain that you can't sell software once it is free or open. That's bull. If you can't come up with a viable business model, it doesn't mean one doesn't exist. In fact, there are game companies using and selling open source and free software commercially. All within the GPL or whatever license they happen to use. I find it funny when someone claims that they refuse to look at open source because they can't sell service contracts for games. So what? Sell something else! Why does the term "open source" or "free software" somehow equate to "can only charge for support"?

As far as "selling Linux", Red Hat makes quite a bit doing just that. Suse/Novell, IBM, HP, etc, all make quite a bit of money selling Linux to corporations. And none of them have to close the source to make it commercial.

There are a lot of people who think that the GPL means you must give out the source, period. It's not true. GPL zealots likely haven't read the license and likely don't understand it. They believe "GPL means free source code" and that is all that colors their worldview. Yes, the GPL requires you to make the source available, but it doesn't require that you do so for no charge nor does it require you to distribute the source to anyone who didn't receive the binary in the first place. In fact, if they want the source only, you can charge whatever you want for the privilege. It says so in the GPL itself!

So please stop claiming that open source or free software is the opposite of commercial. They aren't opposites.

Quote: Original post by Sijmen
Same for me, I'd like to test. My Linux installation is currently doing nothing because of the lack of a good Visual C++ like dev environment, so that would be a reason to screw it up to test yours :)

you wuss! :)

I'd like to se an IDE like this on linux myself, but that doesn't mean I cannot get work done. Stuff like MSVC is a luxury many can't even afford :). Im currently debugging on 4th hour with gdb backtraces and a thousands cerr' statements :) (because im too lazy to read the gdb docs).

if( !PacketBufW.isValid() )
cerr << "aaaargh" << endl;

YannL:

I'm not doing any work on linux but the screenshot is looking interesting. Seems to be well laid out and if I ever do any Linux work, I sure would like to try it.

Do what you feel is right with this project, it really doesn't matter what some whiners think. If it gets popular then you'll have the satisfaction of their shame ;)

I like it how people whine about not being able to use their Visual C++ on Linux... as if they paid for their Visual C++ in the first place.

If you stop being cheap, you can get an industry-strength IDE from Borland (C++ BuilderX Professional/Enterprise) and just get on with your life.