Xopus

[Stefano Mazzocchi <st...@apache.org>]

After a long and productive exchange of email, the people at q42 
(creators of the Xopus XML editor) decided that they don't want to 
dedicate their effort to an open source involvement.

They will continue the development of Xopus in-house and for commercial 
interests and will not further improve the version they made available 
on the web at xopus.org.

They wish good luck to any project that would like to improve on that 
codebase and make an OSS project out of it (they know they don't have 
the rights to revoque the apache-like license they used to release xopus 
as open source) but they will not help in such an effort unless they 
found a major money sponsoring for it and none is at the horizon.

In short, their concern is about finding a way to make a living and 
continue to have fun doing innovating software. They believe that 
embracing OSS will force them to move into a service market and this is 
a direction they don't want to follow.

As a fan of the xopus concept, I'm sad to report this, but as potential 
apache sponsor of the project, I believed that this choice will save 
both sides a lot of pain, troubles and negative energy.

It could be entirely legal for any of us to take the open source Xopus 
version, give the deserved credit, change the project name and incubate 
a project here for an inline XML editor, but it won't be ethical from my 
point of view since I personally cared about the people behind the 
software, rather then the software itself. Having the software without 
the people who created it, it's pointless, stupid and will irritate many.

The concept of inline editors is a very nice one, but it wouldn't be 
worth loosing respect and friendship from all the people involved.

I would like to thank Lon and the rest of the people at q42 for being 
such great guys and I wish them all possible luck for their commercial 
ventures.

Ciao.

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi                               <st...@apache.org>
    Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate [William of Ockham]
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