Bounty Proposal: Tools Bounty

This bounty suggests raising money to allow the ROOL DDE tools to be distributed at zero cost to all users. ¹
With the primary goal of encouraging more contributions to the ROOL project.

It would likely involve one or both of the following.

1) Contacting Codemist and offering to ‘buyout’ continuing royalty payments related to their rights regarding sales.
2) Compensating ROOL for the lack of the income stream that the tools provide.

Why?

At the moment the ROOL project has an absolute requirement to use the DDE tools. ²
At the moment there are free and close to free platforms that are capable of running a freely provided RISC OS. By removing the cost of the tools, both initial and continuing (the updates), one of the barriers of directly contributing to the ROOL project is removed.
Additionally it would allow the ROOL project to make changes to the code that require updated tools without worrying if users will have the latest version.
This bounty would give an opportunity for non-developing users of RISC OS to directly contribute to encouraging development.

How Much?

I do not know how much would need to be raised, but ROOL and Codemist should be able to put a price on it, which is a little different from most of the other bounties.

Finally.

Is the income stream worth more to ROOL than the potential for more contributions? And as a prospective donor to this bounty can you contribute cash now for potential benefit later?

¹ This bounty does does not suggest releasing the source to the tools, whilst nice, that may be beyond what is practically achievable.
² Building RISC OS with gcc doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere in 10 odd years, it’s probably not going to happen.

Sounds like a good idea to me; most other platforms have the official tools available for free these days, so charging for them is a bit of an outmoded concept. I understand the reasons for it, but would gladly contribute to make things more accessible for everyone.

It’d be interesting to see what price Codemist/ROOL would come up with!

It seems that, on 23rd April this year, Codemist will cease to exist as a company.

How this may affect things I don’t know, nor in whom any residual rights may be vested.

Codemist will cease to exist as a company.

Reference?
The options available may depend upon the reason why. Quitting? Buyout? VC stripping?

At any rate, I think it may be worth somebody at ROOL having a quiet word sooner rather than later.

Reference?

Easy enough to check the details of a company:

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/02197915

If ROOL are aware I would presume they have had discussions about taking on the code in some form – open or closed source would be the longer debate.

Reference?

Here

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/02197915/filing-history

Just look at the PDF files.

http://www.codemist.co.uk/index.html – so very useful… ;-)

Having checked the accounts of Codemist they are not the recipients of the previously mentioned royalties. So I guess it’s Castle.

Maybe they can comment about this, as it stands at the moment RISC OS is in competition for time with millions of other open projects that don’t have a 50 quid ‘join the club’ fee.