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Old 12-26-2018, 03:27 PM   #59
Rednroll
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Join Date: Jan 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cyrano View Post
A lot of confusion here...

Open source means that the source is available for everyone to see. Nothing more, nothing less.

It doesn't necessarily mean "free", nor "gratis". And it hasn't got much to do with specific licenses either. Open source software can be commercial and have a very limiting license. Or it can be gratis, free and unlicensed, eg public domain. And everything in between.

I know a lot of people associate "open source" with "gratis" but that's quite simply wrong. If you look at server or security software, you'll see a lot of it is open source, but not gratis. It's open source because it is derived from other open source software, or because of trust. How can you trust security software if you can't inspect the source?
Thank you Cyrano....this is correct information. Like I stated an SDK and Open Source are completely different. An SDK provides developers the means to interface and communicate with existing source code. It is not the actual source code and the actual source code can not be modified by the 3rd party developer. Therefore calling ASIO open source and referencing the ASIO SDK is completely inaccurate.

Like you mentioned there are various licenses. A GPL v3 license requires the developers to share any changes to the actual source code and additionally requires the sharing of the code which interacts with that source code. An MIT license is different where it requires any changes to the actual source code to be shared, but allows developers to maintain proprietary aspects in not having to share code that interacts with the source code. So which type of license does the ASIO driver fall under? Neither! Because it's not Open Source code which is licensed under any of the available open source code licenses, it's an SDK where the actual code is often provided as a binary where the code the 3rd party developers write only interfaces with that binary code but does not alter the binary and the actual code is not provided to the 3rd party developers....it's not "open Source".

Last edited by Rednroll; 12-26-2018 at 03:37 PM.
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