[Xitami] ProtoNova v1.0 Released! (And a XiFusion note)

[Pieter Hintjens]

"Thomas J. Hruska" <shinelight@shininglightpro.com> wrote:

> ProtoNova is a closed source web server designed to accomplish several
> goals...

Thanks for the information, which I think everyone on this list will 
appreciate reading.  Just for the record, the Xitami license 
agreement says that you can do just about anything you want with the 
source code.  It is not even GPL - you could use it in a closed-
source server without breaking the license.

The rest of this discussion probably belongs on xitami-dev but I'll 
post it here because the question came on this list.

Why not put Xitami on SourceForge?  This is a matter of judgement: in 
the many years that Xitami has been out in the wild, we have had a 
few contributions (such as Thomas J. Hruska's Xifusion, and LRWP), a 
fair number of bug fixes and code patches, and an incredible number 
of feature requests and bug reports.  But we have not seen anyone 
pick up the source code and propose useful improvements to its core 
design or basic functionality.  One possible reason is that Xitami 
uses a complex toolset: Libero, SFL, SMT, WSX,... the server is not 
something that you open up and say 'ah, I understand'.  Conclusion: I 
do not believe it would work well as a collaborative open source 
project.

More importantly for iMatix, Xitami represents strategic technology.  
This may make some people laugh, considering that Xitami is unstable 
in some situations, but I mean it seriously.  We use Xitami and the 
underlying technologies (SMT, etc.) very heavily in our work.  We are 
happy to make this available to the wide world, because we believe in 
spreading our technology around, but we want to keep control of what 
goes into our tools.

Some people have suggested, and I think this is a great idea, to 
simply upload the Xitami source code to SourceForge, and start a true 
collaborative development.  iMatix would give their blessing to such 
a project, though we would ask that such a project use a different 
name.  We would make one suggestion, though: to use the GPL instead 
of the current license.  We also plan to do this with future releases 
of our source code.

I hope this helps to clarify iMatix's position with respect to Xitami.

-
Pieter Hintjens
iMatix Corporation