After following all this discussion here and on laserfreak.net I have to give my (possibly minor) opinion on this. When you write an API the work you put in is that it works for your hardware. What others take from this work to write wrappers etc. are only the three lines of function declaration which are called by the third party software.Originally Posted by JoJo
We published the API years ago to allow other programmers and hobby laserists writing their own software for EasyLase DACs . Naturally we didn't all the work to support competitor interfaces. This is no hobby for us. And we don't work for free. But if anybody of you decides to work for free for his boss from now on, we invite him to quit his job and start working without payment for us
Okay, the thing backfired. We have learned from this.
There will be changes in the future:
- software programmers: please never ask us for free interfaces again.
- future documents will include pages full of license notes and terms of use, if you feel better with that (Sounds like "Do not put pets in the microwave to dry them").
We will retain a lawyer to help us through this complicate stuff.
The cost for this will naturally make our products cheaper
- future hardware will have different operating modes, including secured and crypted ones
- in the future it will be more difficult for people using one and the same hardware for different software, because also the software companies have learned from all this and lock their software against unwanted hardware.
Joachim
When one is self confident enough that his hardware is superior, theres no need to hide this three lines, people will buy the hardware anyway. If not..., time to get paranoid!
There is actually a solution:
A common GPL'ed open source API ! If something like this exists every hardware vendor can decide if he writes a dll which will incorporate this API and every software vendor can decide if he will support this API.
At the moment I am developing something like this, more precise a Java based laserscan software which is modular enough to make the part which talks to the hardware general enough to be such an API.
The software consists of a GUI to draw and arrange frames, optimizer modules, ILDA import/export and hardware drivers. Hardware drivers are currently for 6 channel soundcard dacs only, but easily generalizable.
The whole thing is currently in a very raw state but working. I plan to make it open source once the GUI is polished a bit and the internal structures are cleaned (its quite messy at the moment because I experimented a lot). I don't have too much time to work at it currently (have to finish my PHD at the end of the year) so if somebody likes to join me, it will come out faster!
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