Some of my scripts I’d be happy to share, in exchange for an implied, weak moral obligation for others to similarly share theirs, and put up any improvements they might make to mine.
The kind of scripts I’m thinking of achieve their mission, but aren’t polished and certainly not robust. They do something specific and hopefully useful, (if often esoteric!), and have some, but minimal, documentation.
Is this forum intended for posting that kind of thing? To me it doesn’t quite feel right as most of the issues are learning rather than deployment related. Is there a better place than here? A new category in this forum?
Also licenses… open source with attribution would be fine, and others using in a commercial context would not be a problem for me. But I’d feel a bit annoyed if someone else cleaned them up, compiled them and sold them on. What kind of licenses would you suggest? Could we agree on one?
Well, with scripts it’s kind of open range country. I wouldn’t share anything here that you don’t want everyone in the world to freely use without any kind of compensation express or implied (like sharing their scripts, most won’t be able to write them anyway), and as this site is referenced by Google and others, whatever you post here will travel…
All you can really do is put a copyright and a “please credit…” line in the script - and hope that most people will consent to do that. It’s easy enough to rename some variables and re-arrange some stuff and say it’s a different script anyway. It’s unlikely that someone will repackage your stuff and try to sell it (although it’s possible I guess), the potential for making a lot of money just isn’t there.
If you’re really worried about copying, you can compile your scripts into a plug-in with the rhinoscript compiler and that will prevent the average person from seeing what’s inside and copying it, but it’s not a strong protection against a determined code hacker.
If you want to put your stuff out there in whatever form, I would suggest creating a web page somewhere with a minimal set of explanations and a way to download, then post the link here. If you have some more polished stuff and do create a plug-in with it you may be able to get the plug-in posted on food4rhino.com.
In the past I have been thinking about that issue quite a lot, I have dozens of scripts that could be useful to others and I’d be happy to share them.
There are some sites dedicated to rhino scripting yet they appear not crowded enough to thrive.
Personally I do not think why you could not post them here, just try and see if anyone gets offended.
Thinking about that a topic could be much like this:
That way searching discourse would bring up this topic, making this type of functionality available for all who query this forum:
As for licensing… like Mitch points out stealing, most likely will not be that profitable and if you state a licence type in the file; it can always be referred to in case you want to start legal actions. However IMO being annoyed about something like that is the cost of sharing. For me the joy of sharing is much greater that the possible annoyance over a petty theft. Bottom line would be to not post anything you would not want to become public property.
All my stuff is [here][1]… Another revision with bugfixes and a couple of additions is coming as soon as I get the time to compile it… maybe a week or two… too much stuff on right now…
You may also be interested in using an open source project site like github to store all of your scripts. Github helps you get set up with posting an open source license that would go along with your projects and it is a great tool to learn for anyone who writes code that they want to maintain over the years.
Once you have a project set up on guthub, you can posts links to it here on the discourse forum.
