I have not made regular post because life has been busy!
At work I am finishing up writing a user manual for some software I coded. Creating a manual is not exactually too exciting, but none the less it is a great learning oppurnitunity and gives me a chance to do some much needed software testing.
In my personal life I have started going out more on the weekends and check out some of the night life Atlanta offers. This seems to be more costly than staying in, but it is good to try and have some fun every now and then (right?). I also have discovered that I enjoy dancing (if you call it that..haha). It is fun to just let loose on the dance floor and not worry about anything but rocking to the beat. I can really only imagine how funny it must be…yeah
I am always reading and looking into new technology, open source projects, etc. and yesterday I came across the open source version of the RubyFlow.com from Peter Cooper and decided that I would take it for a spin with my Heroku beta account. The result was making on of the domains I purchased over a year ago into a site. Now, the site is not finished but I was able to get it up in no time using the clean code from Peter and the easy deployment to Heroku using GIT. I was starting to move out of the Ruby On Rails camp and back over to the PHP camp because of deployment issues I seem to have with Rails, but I think I may give it a bit more time and see what happens with Heroku. Check it out at BIMBuzz.com. The general concept of the site is the same as RubyFlow – community driven links, but specific to Building Information Modeling. If I continue the project using the RubyFlow source I am sure I will try to become a contributor to the code base. I am very happy with the neatness and simplicity of the code so far.
I tried out another open source application for Building Information Modeling called BIMServer.org. It is a java based server application that stores IFC files and pushes and pulls them threw the server. I didn’t test it (other than installing it) because I am not happy with the license it is released under, but it is a project I plan to keep an eye on, because creating a similar type of server software for hosting IFC files is on my list to do.
Ahh it is a lazy Sunday and I am feeling tried…I think I need some caffeine!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Dustin,
What is it you do not like about the license of bimserver.org?
Leon,
I think I may have misunderstood the terms of the license.
I am not clear if it could be used in commercial work.
Leon,
I reviewed the GPL and the LGPL licenses and found what I didn’t like about the GPL. Basically the GPL doesn’t allow the project to be used in (as a library) or linked to proprietary software (or different license), so if I wanted to use the BIMServer in one of my projects that is not open source or uses a different license, I would be out of luck.
I like the freedom of the LGPL and think the terms still protect the interest of the project contributors/creators. LGPL still requires copyleft – this I think is important for open source projects. If I used BIMServer in a proprietary software and decided to make actual modifications to the BIMServer code I would be requires to share these modifications back to the community under both LGPL & GPL.
I think both licenses are a bit sticky and I think the license chosen is important to the success/failure of an open source project. I maybe wrong, but I think a large percent of contributions (in terms of coding & funding) to open source projects are from companies that use the various projects in their own projects that are likely to have a license that is not GPL.
Hope that clears up my statement about not liking the BIMServer’s current license, GPL.