On 22.07.2020 00:38, Bald Eagle wrote:
> My own impression of the state of that was: "we're not allowed to have the
> code", which we'd need to do, to see / review it - because it proprietary or
> whatever - and so it's kind of a catch-22.

In order to even get it to compile again, Lutz had to do the conversion 
to Visual C(++) 2010. Various people have had access to the code over 
time because they volunteered to take a look or were/are part of the 
POV-Team. This includes me (I actually still have access because I have 
a local copy and always had access to the perforce server we used before 
github).

The code is in a fairly good state, but it is written for a really not 
very standard-compliant old Visual C, using MFC, and to make matters 
worse using really "old" ways of doing things in the Windows GUI world. 
What many, many users do not realise is how bad the Win32 GUI 
programming was actually broken by Microsoft, and how many toolkits, 
libraries, and abstraction one had to throw over it to make a program 
like Moray possible.

So as long as Moray was commercial, you could just buy a license to such 
code, in particular the whole toolbar in Moray, integrate and modify 
said code under that license, and distribute it in binary form. So far, 
so good. But it does not get you anywhere if you have to convert 
commercial code to open source. Then you actually, for the sake of 
copyright law (and common sense), have to check where that code went and 
if you didn't move things here or there. Then you have to take it out, 
and do a clean room rewrite, or actually replace it with something current.

Want an estimate? - It would take 4-5 month full-time (but I am not 
offering full-time), 40h/week and my going rate is 120 Euro/hour (plus 
VAT) for freelance work*.

Thorsten


* After all taxes, rent, insurance, etc about 40% of that get into one's 
pocket in Germany, btw.

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