What is old is new again...

Want to talk about something that isn't covered by another category?

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richmond62
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by richmond62 » Fri Jan 26, 2018 11:26 am

I really ought to stop living in a fantasy world.
fantasy.png

bogs
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by bogs » Fri Jan 26, 2018 5:22 pm

FourthWorld wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 11:04 am
folks using the GPL-governed Community Edition would have difficulty knowing for sure what they can and cannot do with it...
That is the pickler. While many Oss licenses are pretty liberal, they (usually) take great care not to trample over proprietary rights, as it should be.

BTW Richmond, loved the email, it made my day :D
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by mwieder » Sat Jan 27, 2018 3:48 am

I'm thinking (without checking because I don't have a v2 here) that at least the password-protection scheme would have to be removed from the engine before GPLing it. And I'm sure other thought would have to go into that as well. But having looked through the engine code since the first OSS release days, I don't think I'd want to go back to the mess the engine was in those days. Open-sourcing the engine is an entirely different matter from making the release free (as in money), and as the engine is dependent on licensing to a protected home stack, there would be at least a lot of work to do in rereleasing this.

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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by bogs » Sat Jan 27, 2018 5:37 am

The engine itself is not in question, although I certainly wouldn't be messing with it even if it were, that is above my pay-grade :D

In this case, we are simply talking about the documentation stacks, the help system if you will, along with the tutorials and cookbook of the time which has solutions to many things that still come up (for me, anyway) and I am sure a few others.
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by richmond62 » Sat Jan 27, 2018 9:15 am

Personally this is ALL that I'd probably want to hack:
221hack.png

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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by bogs » Sat Jan 27, 2018 10:10 am

Well, that is what I enjoy the most. That documentation was spot on.
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by richmond62 » Sat Jan 27, 2018 10:24 am

What we all need to do is to "sit tight", cross our fingers, and wait till Monday as
the folk at LiveCode Central should then give us some sort of guidance at that
point about where and what we can and cannot do.

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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by FourthWorld » Sat Jan 27, 2018 8:23 pm

Kevin replied to my query on this yesterday (sorry for the delay in relaying it here; it's been a busy season).

The gist is pretty much as I'd guessed: the level of effort needed to resurrect and revise such an old version to ensure that it's GPL-compatible would take too much time away from current priorities to be practical.

He also noted, as we might have guessed, "We don¹t generally mind people doing things like modifying or extracting the IDE in these versions of course."

Seems like a clear green light on personal modification, which he's always been very supportive of.

I guess the only gray area which may remain would be about re-distribution of the modified works. My hunch there is I don't think that would pose any problem for the company, provided the modified work be clearly identified as not anything official from their company of course.

Bogs, what exactly would you like to do with those stacks? If there are remaining questions I'm happy to follow up with Kevin for any guidance needed.
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by bogs » Sat Jan 27, 2018 9:35 pm

Well, thanks to you and Richmond, I guess I have a pretty good idea of response from Lc on what is fairly allowed and what might be objectionable. I'll try to make sure I float anything intended past someone before releasing it just to make sure.

For my own use, I don't need to do anything, I have a fully functioning (with in the limits of the intentions of the original distribution) version of 2.2.1 thanks to what Richmond turned me onto a few months back, so I am set.

As to what I would like to do with it, starting with the documentation I'd like to cut it out like I did with the Mc help stacks. What the company indicated through email was that they didn't see a problem as long as references were changed or eliminated to prevent confusion in branding, as you mention above.

That may take me some time, but I feel it is worth while, as much of the information is still relevant and many examples and tutorials stored in there still work (I haven't tested all of them yet).

I think I'd also wind up taking a look at how that glossary works, it is like a universal look up. If possible, I'll pull that as well.

Features that aren't documentation, but that I may implement personally would be parts of the script editor. It has as I mentioned above, a form of autocomplete which I think can be modd'ed to make it a bit more functional. Even as it sits, though, it works pretty well if your keyboard happy like I am :D

That last part is long term down the road, the Doc's are what I'd be looking at (relatively sooner).

Still looking for a legitimate way to purchase RR enterprise 3.0, any ideas? :twisted: I found a copy that looked too good to be true, unfortunately, Heather confirmed it was too good to be true. Would have been the best $30. I spent in a long time if it were legit :roll:
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by FourthWorld » Sat Jan 27, 2018 10:06 pm

bogs wrote:
Sat Jan 27, 2018 9:35 pm
As to what I would like to do with it, starting with the documentation I'd like to cut it out like I did with the Mc help stacks. What the company indicated through email was that they didn't see a problem as long as references were changed or eliminated to prevent confusion in branding, as you mention above.
If you're interested in redistributing the modified work for others, perhaps I can get guidance from Kevin on an appropriate license. At that point it isn't LiveCode, but it is derived from their work, so a few different considerations come into play:

- I'm guessing they'd like a license which clearly absolves them of any potential liabilities;
- And one that acknowledges their copyright on the original work;
- And which is ideally compatible with both proprietary and GPL editions of current LC versions.

I believe all of those may be covered under MIT License, but I'm not in a position to guess what might be in the IDE stacks or what LC's needs may be for such an unusual case.

If you have a collection of stacks you want to redistribute it may help if I could point him to that collection so he can consider them in isolation of the rest of the install, which no doubt is encumbered with other licensing considerations.
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by bogs » Sat Jan 27, 2018 11:14 pm

Yes, those are all the problems I was thinking about, which is why I haven't attacked it as yet. Not only do those stacks have things from RR/Lc, but also from you, Jacque, and many others. I would have to contact a lot of people above and beyond Lc to make sure no one has a problem with any of this :wink:
FourthWorld wrote:
Sat Jan 27, 2018 10:06 pm
If you have a collection of stacks you want to redistribute it may help if I could point him to that collection so he can consider them in isolation of the rest of the install...
Well, as of right now, I have a collection of nothing other than the IDE as is. However, what you said is what I meant when I said
bogs wrote:
Sat Jan 27, 2018 9:35 pm
I'll try to make sure I float anything intended past someone before releasing it just to make sure.
I just like knowing the ground rules as much as possible before I go nuts, and I know that unlike Mc, this isn't my sole playground :D
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by FourthWorld » Sat Jan 27, 2018 11:57 pm

What MC has going for it is a standard and very liberal license, MIT.

There are good reasons why LC is dual-licensed with the mix it has, but it does sometimes require us to think more in the few cases where what we want to share is a derivative of IDE stuff.

FWIW, if there's anything with my name on it that came included with either LC or MC, it's covered by each IDE's respective license.
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by bogs » Sun Jan 28, 2018 3:58 am

FourthWorld wrote:
Sat Jan 27, 2018 11:57 pm
FWIW, if there's anything with my name on it that came included with either LC or MC, it's covered by each IDE's respective license.
...looking for the fine print Image

Edit --
You were asking the kinds of things I find so invaluable in the older documentation, and as I was assessing what I think are the better parts of it, I found a pretty good example.
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Few things I find great here, browsing by category - all the categories break down *all* of the possible information for that category. The highlighted 'listing handlers in a script' example took me months to find out how to do it, and that was mostly by cheating a LOT. I didn't find it in the .pdf, I sure wouldn't have assembled it from guessing words to use and looking them up in the dictionary.

This style of help lets the user go directly to what they are looking to accomplish, and breaks it down further by subject, tips, recipe/example, dictionary listings that pertain to the category, a glossary, the list goes on and on.

For someone like me, this type of help trumps what I started with, and was even an improvement over Mc's help (and you know how much I liked THAT). Now, I only know about the community editions myself, since I only dev without profit in mind and mostly for just a very few people. I can't say whether other editions have something more like this or not (but I assume not).

The tutorials - These start with a very simple project, and build on that as you complete each one touching on a multitude of important concepts, finishing up with databases.
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(Side note, I believe in the about box, Richard is credited for the initial draft of this very stack).

The cookbook - I've seen questions for every one of these topics (with the exception of the 99 beers routines :P ) in the time I have been on the forums. Imagine if this was still included with the IDE.
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I think we lost a lot when this style of documentation went away somewhere around the 3-4 series (information found wasn't clear).
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by jacque » Sun Jan 28, 2018 6:45 pm

Not only do those stacks have things from RR/Lc, but also from you, Jacque, and many others.
Much of the early documentation was written by a woman under hire and myself. Since this was a legal "work for hire" the material is owned by LC who holds all the permissions.

I expect that most or all of the example scripts will work fine, LC is extremely backward compatible. The problem will more likely be that the material is sometimes obsolete. One example that comes to mind is the handler for stripping out empty lines from a script. It was written before the filter command was altered to include "filter without empty", which accomplishes the same thing in a single line of code.

New users who rely on old documentation run the risk of not really learning the language as it currently exists. There have been a lot of additions as well that old documentation won't cover. We've come a long way since version 2.
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Re: What is old is new again...

Post by bogs » Sun Jan 28, 2018 8:20 pm

jacque wrote:
Sun Jan 28, 2018 6:45 pm
The problem will more likely be that the material is sometimes obsolete. One example that comes to mind is the handler for stripping out empty lines from a script. It was written before the filter command was altered to include "filter without empty", which accomplishes the same thing in a single line of code.
What you say is absolutely correct, but here is the (in my mind) much larger problem. The older documentation still works (probably better than 98% in new versions) because as you pointed out, Lc is pretty good at maintaining backwards compatibility.

I know that the exercise is hard to do for someone that has been using something for a long time, but try to put yourself in a "user who is touching Lc for the first time position". I am going to avoid touching on other sore spots, like the backdrop fiasco, and concentrate on just documentation.

Let us even say you are a conscientious user, who is trying to figure out how to do 'task x'. For this example, 'task x' is filtering an empty line of text. Do you think it is easier, not knowing the language, to find *any* information on doing this in Lc as it stands now, or in the older versions?

I can only speak for myself, but I didn't even know about 'filter' until I read about it on these forums (unrelated thread).

If I were looking to find out about it from the documentation in Lc 9, I *could* slog through a 375 page pdf or try to track it down in the dictionary by following bread crumb trails, or come to the forums and post a question, or try to figure out which of the lessons might point at it on the website (if I knew about that option, I didn't find that till later in my usage of Lc).

If I'm in RR 2, I can open 'documentation', select 'categories', go to 'text and data', and be presented with a breakdown / summary of each listed item. Hm. If there is a word I don't understand, I can follow that up by hitting the word in a lot of cases, or looking it up in the glossary. Now, if I were still lost at that point, I could follow the options above by going to the forum, etc.

As far as the addition to filter goes, I think it is great that it was added to that. I also would think that as you became more comfortable with the environment, you would eventually get to that one line. Myself, I don't mind writing a few more lines to get something done, I just want to find out how to do it.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think resurrecting this stuff is the 'ideal ' way to learn, I think the far more 'ideal' way would be to have it resurrected AND updated AND included in the current IDE. (watch how many yowls that one produces).

I don't see it happening, and since that is the case, AND we already have this available, AND no one has to re-write it, this is the next best alternative (resurrection).
New users who rely on old documentation run the risk of not really learning the language as it currently exists. There have been a lot of additions as well that old documentation won't cover. We've come a long way since version 2.
I don't see this as as being the end of someone learning, just as a good solid foundation for the beginning and a decent reference to look back at. Once someone has gotten familiar enough with Lc, they should be able to have some idea of what they are looking to do and can go through the more difficult documentation if they want.

Side question - How old are the scripting conferences? I think they are still valid as documentation. I'm sure you do. I'm sure a few others do as well. Does age alone define somethings usefulness? If that is the case, I'm obsolete as well, bogs 2.0 works much better :lol:

Real shocker - I think the tips in 2 were fantastic as well and should be brought back :P
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Honestly, I didn't ever think having another resource for learning/teaching was considered a bad thing. Maybe I'm wrong.
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