Thanks for the advice.
You can just slap a GPL license on the code and dump it on GitHub but it's not the best path forward because without an active community of contributors, the project is likely to languish and die.
I'm very much aware of that. If it's going to die as open source I may as well take the high six figure offer I have had and let it die as a cash cow instead. As I said, my accountant thinks I'd be crazy to go open source.
The documentation has to be open source too.
It would be. You don't want to know how much it cost me to buy back the royalty agreement I had with the documentation author.
But a product targeted to machinists means that the vast majority of your users are not software developers and would lack the skills required to contribute. You have to solve that problem.
Yeah, that's a sticky one. I have tens of thousands of licensed users but as you say the vast majority just want to cut metal. They aren't interested in coding.
Finally, the platform matters a lot. Is it written in something obscure?
C++ with a sprinkling of Lua. It is built on wxWidgets so it can be built on Linux, Windows and theoretically Mac. All pretty standard stuff.
Then offer to sell technical support contracts that include pre-compiled binary files.
I'm not really interested in supplying paid tech support. TBH the need to provide tech support is one of the main reasons why I am giving up.
Also you might work on showing how SheetCam works with the CAD programs people are using. Perhaps FreeCad is a good starting place.
SheetCam can accept dxf or svg files from pretty much any cad package. If you are interested, do a search for SheetCam on YouTube. You'll find a lot of tutorial videos.
However, if it were integrated into FreeCAD like AlibreCAM was into AlibreCAD the future for that software might be quite bright.
I've always avoided integrating SheetCam with CAD. The reason for this is that half my customers are producing accurate mechanical parts and the other half are producing complex artistic work. No CAD package out there works well for both mechanical design and artistic work. In the open source world FreeCad or LibreCad are good for mechanical work but Inkscape is much better for artistic work.
I need to have a chat with some of my bigger OEMs. Maybe we can come up with some agreement where they sponsor someone to maintain the project. It would work out considerably cheaper for them than buying SheetCam licenses.
I would be quite interested in helping maintain and improve it. Time to work on it is the only problem, but I think that I could work on it a little here and there.
Thanks Moses. Les _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
