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Open sourcing of EQMac


OzDave

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Over the past few years I've not been able to make much progress on EQMac for various reasons and it seems a shame to see the project stagnate when a fair few people seem to find it useful for their astronomy needs. Therefore, I am considering releasing the code as open source in a similar way as was done with PHD Guiding. I have not officially decided to do this yet, but I thought I would post here and see if there are any people who think this is a good idea and would actually be willing to contribute to the project.

Of course, if I did make it open source, people could do what they liked, but I would hope that people would want to contribute code back to the project and that I would continue to administer new releases and so forth. The problem I have is really the amount of time I can spend writing and testing code. Therefore, maybe it is time to let others help and move to a more administrative role.

What do people think?

FYI - it's currently an Objective-C project although I am thinking of moving it to Swift sometime.

Regards,

David

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I think it's an excellent idea.  If you put the source on github or something similar then people can fork their own copies, develop enhancements and request that those changes be pulled back into the "master" sources once they work.  That's something I plan to do with oaCapture when I have it a little more stable (which will hopefully be soon).

It also enables the project to have a life beyond your will or ability to maintain it.  I can think of a number of closed-source projects (a couple specific to astronomy) where the maintainer no longer wanted to do development and couldn't find anyone to take it on, or in one case sadly died, and as a result useful pieces of software were then effectively lost to the community.  Obviously it's their prerogative to keep the source closed even when giving the binaries away for free, but it's a shame when a piece of work that may represent many thousands of hours of the developer's time, that they have given at least in part for the benefit of others who find it useful, is no longer available.

James

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