Is RoboVM closed source ?

[Kirill Prazdnikov]

Hi

It seems that https://github.com/robovm/robovm has not been updated for 2 month. 

RoboVM is closed source project now, right ? 

Thanks 

 -Kirill

[hen...@robovm.com]

Hello

Our work to add full support for iOS 9 in time for its public release was one of the most daunting challenges we’ve faced in our existence.  A key observation that we kept returning to during this period was the fact that, while RoboVM has been open source for more than 2 years, we have received no notable external contributions to the components that represent the core of our product - the compiler, runtime, and Java bindings to the iOS APIs.  This is unsurprising given the nature of the project; contributing to an ahead-of-time compiler requires a unique set of skills and an intimate knowledge of the behaviors of iOS and the inner workings of complex virtual machines.  At the same time, it means that neither RoboVM customers nor us, as the maintainers of RoboVM, have realized any benefits to sharing the products source under such liberal terms. While we are strong believers and supporters of OSS -- as evident from our contributions to various projects such as libGDX -- RoboVM’s continued development and longevity requires a competitive and healthy business.

As such, with the introduction of iOS 9 support and our updated pricing, we’re officially moving RoboVM to a reference source business model.  While we’ll continue to contribute back to the most active RoboVM projects - such as the Gradle and Maven plugins, and RoboVM samples and templates - access to the source of our proprietary improvements to RoboVM will be reserved for our Enterprise customers.

Thank you

[Carsten]

Hello

Cool. Now we understand. You were in talks with Xamarin for a while and one of the requirements was an
updated price model (no more free stuff!) and closing down the source. Thanks for translating this process into corporate bs-bingo.

Attract people for years with an open source model until you attract enough users and are acquired by the next bigger fish. Then we immediately go from open source feel good to updated pricing, closed source. Genius!

Thank you

[KH]

Haha. Sneaky. Cudoz RoboVM. The corporate force is strong in this one :*

"While continue making this open source if no one works for me for free?"

You are right. Why continue the Open Source path now that you have locked enough people into your platform and sold with much profit? It makes no sense anymore. Open Source was there to attract people and create a free, helpful community. Now that's done we can shut it down.

Let's just hope Apache, Clang, LLVM, etc. don't follow your lead!

[Tom Ball]

In a word, nonsense. There may not have been any pull requests to RoboVM, but most of its JRE runtime came from Apache Harmony and Android, with the latter having some Mac-specific code. There also looks to be some copying from J2ObjC's runtime, too. All of these uses are perfectly legal, as these projects are all licensed with the Apache 2.0 license, and those teams are happy to share code with other projects without attribution. You can't justify going closed-source by claiming that no one else was contributing to RoboVM's source, though. Just admit that Xamarin made you do it, without blaming the open-source community.