Hi Erik, You, and at least one other person, are definitely missing my point. I'll take the blame for not expressing myself properly. I'll try again.
I am not disparaging Tormach. At all. As I've said, I believe their switch to LinuxCNC will be good for them and for their customers. In fact, I have publicly suggested this in the past on several occasions. I've even tried in vain to convince Tormach owners who were dissatisfied with Mach to install LinuxCNC on their own. I also think Tormach and their customers will be very well served by MESA Electronics hardware. My comments that apparently seemed so negative to you were not intended to relate to the legal issue of who owned the code. Obviously, if they paid for the code, they own the code, regardless of whether an employee or an off-site contractor wrote it. I've written a fair amount of code as an off-site contactor, and I certainly wouldn't belittle that contribution. I did not say one word about the legal aspects, licensing requirements, etc. I don't know what Tormach might be legally required to do, and I'd greatly prefer to leave that issue for others to resolve. I also had very little to say about what could be considered the "ethical" aspect... what they "should" do with the code they paid to have developed. Others were hurling pejoratives and mild profanities, but not me. I feel no hostility toward Tormach. They're helping a lot of people get into small scale machining who otherwise wouldn't. How is that not a good thing? I see Tormach as good, and LinuxCNC on Tormach as better. I did say that I hoped they'd send some of that goodness back to the open source community so we could all benefit, but that wasn't a criticism. That's just me being optimistic. Early on, I did say that I doubted a lot of that code will be open source, and frankly I still do for the user interface and conversational wizards. They made a substantial investment to develop some of that code and I think they'd probably like to keep some of that user interface as a proprietary Tormach look and feel. If so, that's a shame, because the direction they took is very much along the direction that I'd like to see LinuxCNC progress, but I didn't have their resources (financial motivation) to help move it in that direction. If someone in the LinuxCNC community develops a case of PathPilot envy, someone will write an open source version. Part of the reason that people were jumping to false conclusions about Tormach not giving back to the community is the result of how tight lipped they were about it. They seem to be downplaying the open source aspect. I'm spit balling here, but it looks to me as if they were almost forced to choose LinuxCNC because it's technically better, and they might be feeling some corporate reluctance about going down the Mach path for so long and taking their customers with them? Nobody likes to admit a mistake. Or maybe they don't want to encourage potential customers to buy a small 1990s era VMC with outdated controls by telling them how easy it is to convert it to LinuxCNC? If there was any animosity in my email, it was very minor, and nothing but the good natured engineer versus marketing clash. I'm an engineer, and the product is what matters. Marketing people believe how the product is presented is what matters. Sadly, I think the marketing people are almost always right when the criteria is measured based on what makes a financially successful product. I'm curious how much Tormach developed in house not for legal reasons, or "ethical" reasons, or because I'm a hater. I'm curious because the marketing part of this seems weird to me and I'd like to understand it. If I was doing the Tormach marketing, I'd play up the Free Open Source Software aspect, brag about giving back to the community, while expounding about the NEW & IMPROVED hard realtime reliability, the enhanced features, etc. Instead, they seem to be acting as if they were caught kissing their cousin. Bruce On 02/18/2015 07:49 AM, Erik Christiansen wrote: > On 18.02.15 06:44, Bruce Layne wrote: >> They do admit that LinuxCNC is the underlying software, but claim they >> made substantial improvements, when they apparently paid for open source >> code to be developed by someone else. > No, it makes no difference whether a contractor works on-site or off - > copyright belongs to the employer. As the paid work has been made > available to LinuxCNC, IIUC, then all rational and reasonable open > source hopes and expectations have been met, I believe. It seems petty > and irrational to deny the substantial contribution they have in fact > made. Funding a skilled off-site developer (sometimes from the OS > community) to improve OS software is not common. (E.g. Nick Clifton has > done a lot of v850 work on binutils and gcc for NEC, AFAIR.) > > The gift is in fact threefold, as the paid OS developer's skills are > also developed by the project, and it helps to keep the wolf from the > door. (Or maybe better still, pays for new toys.) > > ... > >> Tormach users will be very well served by LinuxCNC software and MESA >> Electronics hardware, but I think it's interesting that Tormach seems to >> feel the need to imply that they did the development. > If they paid for it, then they did it. (They own the copyright, and > their copyright assignment is required before it can become OS in > LinuxCNC. And I appreciate their generosity.) > >> They're a fairly small company and they do a lot of good development, >> but they must feel that they can't allow a market impression that they >> are integrators, putting together tools that others provide. Does >> anyone know if they created their nice looking graphical front end, or >> did they subcontract that as well? It's fine by me either way, but I >> am curious. > Not just curious, but remarkably negative about a substantial and useful > contribution to the LinuxCNC community, AIUI. Do you also expect Lenovo > or Dell to shout the names of manufacturers of their system components, > whether interface cards or hard drives, or is this disdain targeted? > >> Maybe Brian Williams took a job as the marketing director at Tormach. >> If they blog about their helicopter being shot down behind enemy lines, >> and using a PCNC 770 to manufacture the parts they needed to repair the >> helicopter, I'm calling BS. :-) > When you invent such BS, then whose BS is it? > > It seems unreasonable for any CNC vendor to advertise for suppliers of > components, whether power cords, mother boards, or interface cards, when > what they sell is a performance package. It is often an OS licencing > requirement that the software application's presence in the marketed > product be stated, but that is rarely so for purchased components. > > Your remarkably negative take on this collaborative contribution to OSS > surprises me. Would you rather have them use Mach3, and leave LinuxCNC > to its own devices? > > Erik > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=190641631&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
