Help Porting Our TomeRaider to Ubuntu (Scott Dier)

[Constantine Evans]

Mat Ripley wrote:
> What we don't want is to lose revenue from our Windows and Handheld 
> sales of
> TomeRaider.
 >
> We have done lots of freeware over the years but never any OS so its all 
> new
> territory. I hope that our absolute willingness to say "The Ubuntu dev
> comunity can have this code, app and the thousands of Tomeraider reference
> works and ebooks for nothing and we will help as much as we can on any
> level" wont be hampered because of an excessive purism that responds "Thats
> great, but you must also make it OS on Windows" :)

You are certainly free to not open the sources for the Windows portions. 
However, you can't prevent others from changing the Linux version so it 
will run on Windows.

If you open source the code with the non-X11 UI code removed, it won't 
be trivially usable in Windows. It is quite possible that it will run in 
Cygwin, but I don't think those users would cause any significant loss 
of revenue.

However there would be nothing you could do to prevent another developer 
from porting the open sourced Linux version to Windows. This is the main 
issue that you need to consider. I don't consider it a very likely 
possibility, and the developer could always just write a complete free 
version anyway, but it does need to be taken into consideration.

I doubt that the handheld version has enough code in common with the 
other versions to have this issue.

Constantine Evans