Re: Hmm,

et les journaux de "première page" qui parlent de Microsift, de java ou de Google eux ils ont le droit ?

l'IDE est sous GPL
L'interpréteur que j'ai signalé (Zoom) est sous GPL

Le code du compilateur (version 6) est sous une "licence" qui peut être assimilée à du Créative Commons (Paternité Pas de Modification), on peut l'étudier et le recompiler sans problème. A propos de la "liberté" selon le point de vue particulier de la GPL, voici la réponse de l'auteur, disponible ici http://sparkynet.com/spag/backissues/SPAG44

SPAG: Many Internet programs, especially those intended to be used by a
community, are written in public, with open source and frequent published
drafts. Why is Inform 7 only now making its first public appearance?

GN: Partly my nature, no doubt. TADS 3 has had a much more open process - and
perhaps a more confident one. I will certainly plead guilty to being a control
freak. The hard decisions are what to take out, not what to put in, and that
becomes more difficult when there is a nascent user base. (Also, you need to be
careful which wish-lists to read: the wish-list you need to pay most attention
to is the one written by a designer of actual IF, not a well-motivated
bystander.)

Had Inform 7 been developed in open source, I am fairly sure it would now be an
elaborated version of the superficial prototype, and that it would be much the
poorer. And it ought to be remembered that for at least the first year of the
project, I wasn't at all sure it would ever work - "work" in the sense of being
capable enough to be useful.

I do not quite buy the argument put by Eric Raymond in "The Cathedral and the
Bazaar", that the bustling, self-organised world of the bazaar gets things built
better and faster than the secretive clergy. I suspect he chooses a cathedral to
rebut the famous passage in Brooks's "The Mythical Man-Month", which points to
the aesthetic triumph of those cathedrals whose masons stuck to the original
design conception, rather than adding incoherent but fashionable motifs in each
generation. But I think Brooks is right more often than Raymond. (Actually, we
need both kinds of software development: we need both Linux and Mac OS X, the
classically open bazaar and classically secretive cathedral - they keep each
other honest.)

In particular Raymond's argument seems to me applicable only to programs whose
basic operation is clearly understood by all parties in advance. The bazaar gave
us Linux, but Linux was essentially a duplicate of an already very well
established mode d'emploi, as we might say. To be fair to Raymond, though he
says some silly things about academia and is somewhat in the thrall of the Ayn
Rand and Robert Heinlein school of society - I'll bet he read "Farmer in the
Sky" as a kid, and thought it just dandy - let me note that his actual writings
are more pragmatic and less ideological than the 20-point headlines printed
above them. I think Raymond accepts that all projects go through both cathedral
and bazaar phases.

Besides, these two cultures often overlap. Chartres cathedral used to have an
actual bazaar in it, in the middle ages - you could buy vegetables, or even
livestock, and it must have been mayhem sometimes: but that was all right,
because the occasional runaway piglet was never going to be able to knock over
the columns holding up the walls. Well, if Inform is a cathedral, its explicit
support for extensions is the equivalent of inviting the townsfolk in to set up
their stalls.

To give a perhaps ridiculous example - only I don't think it is ridiculous - of
what I mean by holistic design, over the last week we have been worrying about
the colour of two of the icons used in the Scene index. This tiny corner of the
user interface is based on the metaphor of traffic lights - the icons are green,
amber, red. But was the middle colour too yellow? (We looked at photographs of
actual British and American traffic lights at this point.) And was a round shape
quite right, or would it wrongly suggest affinities with other round elements in
the user interface? We didn't spend long on this, but we went through five
iterations of icon designs, and it was time worth spending. I think my ideal for
software may not be as ambitious as a cathedral, but it is good to try to build
something like a Charles Rennie Mackintosh house: one in which the furniture,
the decor and even the cutlery are part of the line of the whole.

The question, of course, is whether anyone would feel able to sprawl out and
relax in a Charles Rennie Mackintosh house. We shall see.

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on megaupload, and let the rest of the world ~~mirror~~ link to it