First group message

[laseray]

Hi,

This is the Improvisor group to discuss the program Impro-Visor and
possible improvements that could be added to it and released as a
separate program (fork).

The original program Impro-Visor is released as free open source
software under the GPL license. Therefore, creating a fork is
completely legitimate thing to do.

Originally we had tried to cooperate with the Impro-Visor project, but
received a very cold reception when we attempted to participate and
help with issues for that program. An outstanding issue was that the
originators actually violated the GPL license, on numbers of occasions
and in different ways, under which they were supposed to release the
program (due to inclusion of other GPL source code within their
application).

We exposed these violations through public online forums and the
originators were forced to start complying with the license. There are
still outstanding violations they need to address as of this writing.

To ensure that users and developers can get the application and its
source code, without undue limitations, the Improvisor project was
created on SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/improvisor).

You can always get the application and source code there now. And for
the most recent version released of Impro-Visor (version 4), some
small fixes have been done to ensure that developers can generate
proper distributable packages of the binary or source from the Ant
build file, that would otherwise cause them to be violating the GPL
also if there were to distribute them.

Due consideration is being given to creating a fork of this
application, since even with this recent release there are obvious
bugs in need of fixing that we know can easily be repaired, not to
mention other useful features that might be added along the way.

Please get the application and try it out. If you are interested in
contributing to making a fork, join on the project.

Cheers,

Raymond Martin