Re: A free 3d medical image viewer (windows/linux/macosx)


Mathieu Malaterre wrote:
Will you be distributing the source code ? If yes, what license ?
No, temporarily, the decision will depend on many factors.Maybe you
can give me a good reason for distributing the source code .

Well, I can give a real application case :) Look at all the answers in
this thread, people are complaining about issues that you will have a
hard time reproducing. I am sure among them there are people willing to
recompile the app, and run it though the debugger. Then they will
either send you a backtrace of the seg fault or even better a patch.
In the past it was better to keep the IP, but now it does not make as
much sense. Esp for you I don't think you have done any particular new
discovery. Instead you reused components that are freely available in
term of license (if we except the case of Qt, which you could deal
separately).

This is a good answer. However, it is not the only reason to consider
Open Source. Assuming that you use the tool yourself, if you open the
development under the right kind of open source licence, you will also
get contributions developed by others back to your own software. For
example, someone might improve your software to view 3D cone beam CT
images (as soon as it's approved and added to the standard). Or any
number of other additions might be contributed. Selection of the right
license can greatly increase the amount of such contributions you might
get. For example, if you use GPL, then many potential commercial
contributors would opt out. If you used a BSD or MIT type licence, then
you aren't guaranteed as many contributions, but since commercial
contributors would be more likely to use the software, you would
probably get more contributions (both bug reports and improvements).
But which license to choose is highly dependent upon your project's
goals.

There are many other reasons open source is helpful to many projects.
These are covered nicely in "The Success of Open Source" by Steven
Weber. One aspect that isn't covered in Steven's book is that being
open source also is helpful for outsourcing. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_outsourcing for information on this
matter.

Well again in an open source model, your users becomes your testers. I
am convinced people would find the time to do the integration for you,
and give you a report.

Absolutely. As you can see from this thread, it is hard to give a good
bug report without the source code. So, instead of a nice bug report
like "fix the increment operator on line 233 of file.cpp" you get a
black eye in a public forum "this program doesn't run on Windows"...
which is much less accurate and fair, and not very helpful either.

-Kelly

.

Relevant Pages

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