I was just reading this article over at The Register:
I can’t thank you all enough for providing both the code and content of SC under open source license. This is a big deal.
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Yes, the Digital Pāli Reader is a great example: originally built on an old Firefox framework, the code has been successfully ported to a proper web app recently.
But this was done by a new team of people. This is the main difference between closed and open source: if an organization messes up (or fails to maintain) an OSS project badly enough, someone will fork the project and keep it alive. This is basically impossible when a for-profit company messes up. They either double down on their mistake (while they can) or they kill it off (sometimes prematurely)… and there’s nothing people outside of the project can do about it.
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Well, IIRC it was you and Blake that first got us working on Github, so let’s share the git blame.
If you haven’t seen it, check out the article by Lewis Lancaster in the Encyclopedia of Buddhism on digital tipitaka projects. It’s a long story of grand efforts that end up as vaporware, of big funding and small vision, of technical achievements that achieved nothing. If those projects were open source, they could be the foundation for something, but here we are.
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I was looking through the code here:
It looks rather simple now, but cutting edge at the time! Hehe.