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dpavlin |
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So why are we writing the openisis software? Because Isis is not open |
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source software, it's not even free software, and that leads to a |
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whole bunch of problems. |
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* problems resulting from closed software |
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- Availability (in theory) |
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Versions of the software exist for some operating systems, library |
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versions and languages. For other environments, there is no |
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version of the software, and there is not much one can do about |
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it. |
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- Availability (in practice) |
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You may download most the software, but it's partly protected with |
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passwords, which you have to order at some national distributor. |
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You have to pay some fee and/or declare some good reasons, why you |
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want to use the software. Then you have to wait. In germany, for |
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example, it didn't work at all for some time, until the newly |
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founded |
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> http://www.isisnetz.de/ IsisNetz |
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remedied the situation. |
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- Availability (in legal terms) |
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Some parts of the software are accompanied by different documents |
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stating some license terms, others are not. Terms seem to be |
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pretty different between countries. One can not easily figure out, |
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what exactly might be allowed usage. |
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- Availability (of documentation) |
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Some documentation is available in english, some only in |
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portugese, espanol or italiano. Only a small part is downloadable |
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at all, most is paperware. |
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- Bugfixing |
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There is no way one can fix a bug, and not much one can do about |
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having somebody fix it. |
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- Extending |
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The only way one could write a Binding for perl or Java would be |
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using the isis.dll. There are problems with regard to required |
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additional libraries (especially some C++ stuff), there are no |
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statements about thread safety, unicode compatibility and so on. |
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As a consequence, it's practically impossible to write a |
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state-of-the-art web application based on an isis db. |
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- Improving |
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Many users develop useful ideas for improvements from practice. |
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Their expertise is lost as they are not able to turn it into |
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improved software. |
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- Enabling |
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While open source software enables people all over the world to |
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shape their tools themselves, closed software lets them in |
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dependency. |
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* benefits of open software |
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To address these problems we feel the need for an open source |
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implementation of isis. Of course it would be best to have all of the |
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existing isis code under one or the other form of open license (GPL, |
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LGPL, artistic or similar as appropriate). |
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On the other hand, an independent secondary implementation has |
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advantages in it's own right. It may have a different focus and |
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develop strengths in one aspect while another aproach performs better |
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in other situations. For example, openisis will have some support for |
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multithreading and unicode, which is paid for by a certain overhead. A |
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rewrite by developers with a different background might introduce new |
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ideas which finally, after having had their indepent test bed, help |
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improve the standard. |
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OpenIsis as a software to access isis databases is and will be freely |
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available for everybody with full sourcecode, no fee, no restrictions. |