iRex Technologies released code

I forgot to mention this, but iRex Technologies has released their source code and adaptations.

From talking with them at T-DOSE and FOSDEM, I have understood that they can use our community help in getting them to understand how to form a healthy win-win relationship with us. I hope the do-people of our community will contact them (for example at the various conferences) and guide them a little bit. I’m sure that this is learning for both sides: we need to understand how technology companies work and what they really need. They need to understand us and about our licensing ideas and ideals. Although I think with Nokia’s Maemo & OpenMoko at least the GNOME community seems to be getting it (like picking LGPL rather than GPL for libraries). Liking the GNOME platform myself, I’m of course biased.

My own personal guideline for this is: do they have the right intentions and are they just struggling to get there? Or do they have the intention to simply steal our work? There’s a huge difference in my opinion.

They had some legal struggles in the past it seems, which I think isn’t abnormal given that they are developing on top of a lot of new technology. It looks like they have the right intentions with our ideals, softwares and licensing. They have a real ePaper device that already and actually works. I’m sure they need quite a lot adaptations to our platforms and application software for the device itself. Why not show that the people who are involved with free software on desktop & mobile are a community of people who are serious with technology companies who want to support their own expertise by leveraging our softwares?

These times are our slot, let’s not miss it again. In general: if you have ideals about software development: please think “do”, not just “talk”. At least that’s my opinion.