It’s amazing how complicated software can get over years of development. My last gig included over a million lines of code, developed over 15 years. 6 months to get marginally productive was considered an accomplishment.
Well but the debugger aswell the compiler are at least interesting. I believe Tom initially was thinking about the Editor, Project Explorer and all the visual UI and IO stuff in the IDE.
The rest of us - the outside world - thinks you have a superb object oriented, structurized masterpiece of software without tweaks and quirks where you simply can browse in your project browser right to the Canvas Object for instance, open its onClick event and just check why this isn’t transparent when double buffered.
The reality seems to be less optimistic 
I believe the question behind all these kind of questions like “should the IDE be open-sourced” is the lack of customization and the ability of easy creating xojo plugins without the need of Xcode or Visual Studio or more and less command line hacks. Maybe an better XojoScript API or an app like App Wrapper for plugins.
I don’t get it. The C plugin API has always been an amazing feature of Xojo. It lets a developer with C skill do 95+% of the (easy) work in Xojo and use C for things that need to be fast. With declares, you don’t need to resort to a plugin to call most 3rd party libraries. Writing a library wrapper API with declares is more accessible than writing a plugin. But at some level, if you want to interface directly with platform and 3rd party libraries, you have to speak their language. No development tool can hide that.
[quote]It really does. Heck Thoms the one that wrote that comment initially on this thread & he HAS worked on the IDE.
Ask our most recent hires - Greg and Travis.
Heck I’ll admit it did when I started - any fix I proposed was reviewed by Aaron before I actually made the fix & committed it.
Parts of the IDE (like the debugger) are so complex they truly boggle the mind.
[/quote]
If the code is that difficult to understand and maintain, it needs some refactoring, give or take open sourcing it.
This type of arrangement would concern me. You would have the “opportunity” to contribute back.
What happens when various people have better version of different aspects of Xojo. Go to Brad’s if you want a better Web Edition, go to Bob’s if you want better database stuff, etc.
If you really want to have a serious discussion about Xojo going “open source” you would change that to “free software” so all users benefit from the best of the community. Otherwise its just take take take from Xojo, Inc. without any guarantee of customer support, and potentially many times more fracturing than already occurs with people on different releases.
I think if you are serious about wanting the source code here in 2014 you work up an escrow deal or similar with Xojo, Inc. like any large enterprise customer might try. It may cost you 25k+ to get access but you now have your security.
If your goal is to simply show that you can do Xojo better than Xojo then I would try to get hired by them.
I as a daily user do not want to see 37 different competing open source versions of the same thing. I’ll stick to the hell that is Feedback instead of that.
Really?
Some of best tool kits, frameworks have been destroyed by open sourcing. Look at qt, a great c++ toolkit! reliable! it’s arguably the best framework ever designed, but was destroyed by open sourcing it.
Wouldn’t have to worry about that at all. I wouldn’t play. :-).
I am a Real/Xojo Basic guy, not an Objektive C or C, nor I want to deal with any system libs for all platforms which may vary and change from version to version. ONE GREAT Advantage of Xojo is the cross-platform abstaction level you get. And I guess this might be a hell of work to achive.
I hold the opinion, that creating plugins should be as easy as creating custom controls or XojoScripts…
[quote=50960:@Phillip Zedalis]This type of arrangement would concern me. You would have the “opportunity” to contribute back.
What happens when various people have better version of different aspects of Xojo. Go to Brad’s if you want a better Web Edition, go to Bob’s if you want better database stuff, etc.[/quote]
You misunderstand. I would never expect Xojo to license people to publicly release forks of the Xojo code base. I would want to be able to privately build the IDE for myself, i.e. put a fix to work ASAP, and submit changes back to Xojo for their consideration and use. They would decide whether or not to use a submission and/or who has the best one to use.
There would never be more then one official, public version of Xojo.
Again, I don’t see this happening for practical reasons. Just clarifying my position.
Hmm thats neither free software nor open source.
If you really are interested in working on the IDE, apply for the job when we are hiring. That’s probably your best shot. [quote=50957:@Maximilian Tyrtania]If the code is that difficult to understand and maintain, it needs some refactoring, give or take open sourcing it.[/quote]
We do that all the time, but some of the concepts are complex, let alone the code.
[quote=50971:@Tomas Jakobs]I hold the opinion, that creating plugins should be as easy as creating custom controls or XojoScripts…
[/quote]
Admirable opinion, but I don’t see the point. What does creating a plugin for Xojo do for you that writing a class does not?
[EDIT]: Another thread this morning triggered a thought… Instead of saying HOW you want Xojo, Inc., to solve a problem, try specifying WHAT the problem is. There are better, easier, less expensive, less radical solutions than open sourcing. Someone who knows a little bit about what’s involved can probably suggest the best solution.
How many of the developers that are advocating that XOJO go open source, are ready and willing to open source all of their revenue creating software?
I thought so… 
[quote=50949:@Tomas Jakobs]Well but the debugger aswell the compiler are at least interesting. I believe Tom initially was thinking about the Editor, Project Explorer and all the visual UI and IO stuff in the IDE.
The rest of us - the outside world - thinks you have a superb object oriented, structurized masterpiece of software without tweaks and quirks where you simply can browse in your project browser right to the Canvas Object for instance, open its onClick event and just check why this isn’t transparent when double buffered.
The reality seems to be less optimistic :-)[/quote]
The reality is that its all still VERY complex
Refactoring it isn’t going to make it the kind of thing you sit down look at & immediately know how it all works or how to fix bug X
The reality is that its all still VERY complex - regardless of how well or poorly its factored
What came first the chicken or the egg?
Both. The egg was inside the chicken
…or was the chicken inside the egg?
It’s turtles all the way down.