It is clear now that some of you do not care for the work that library makers on this forum make, the support they give or any fair play licensing system. Cool...
It is not because you
CAN do something that you
SHOULD, that is not how the law works.
I've experienced cases where my
free BANano library (but with this restriction in its license) was suddenly available on github as part of another
payable library. I had to give the authors a slap on the wrist and they elegantly solved it by removing it and just putting a link to the original download place on this forum which was alright for me.
At the very least as a library maker I should have the ability of his library being excluded from such a system. Since you both don't use my libraries, that shouldn't be a problem for you. That would at least prevent the more novice developer of breaking any license unwillingly. In this scenario, those who do copy
and distribute manually are mostly well aware they are doing something fishy and are just a$$holes (pardon my french
).
Again, for
personal archiving I understand your case (somewhat, see further). What I talk about is of people
selling source code on this forum and distributing some restricted libraries with it. This distinction is essential to understand my point.
But even in the case it would be implemented, it doesn't even solve the problem! You have an archived project, what do you do then? Overwrite your existing 'last' updates of the libraries so you can compile your old project? Probably make a copy first of the 'updated' ones so you can put them back later for your newer projects? Seems like a lot of manual labor too. Or even worse. Someone downloads a 5 year old project from this forum to check something out and overwrites his updated libraries. Hope he has a backup somewhere...
Users should always work with the latest libraries and fix the problems that may arise because of a newer version. If they don't, other problems will come up that are now fixed in the newer versions. And the only way to make sure of that is by having one central place where you can download them. As a dev, I always document where I got my libs from, be it for B4X, Java or any other one I use in a project. Seems like common sense to me. And I agree that this 'central' point could be better in B4X. We now have the google document Erel made where library makers can put in the info for the latest updates and it is a good start. The IDE even shows you if your library is outdated. Another good addition. But I do feel this could be even better.
B4X is build in such a way you can easily keep copies of the whole environment next to each other, although my previous statement of always using the latest versions stands.
I 'm under the impression most B4X library makers do a pretty good job of making their libraries backward compatible. And if it breaks, they probably have a very good reason because Google, Apple or any other vendor has depreciated something so you shouldn't use that old one anyway.
Maybe a compromise could be that, when exporting a project, a list with links to the download place on the forum of all the libraries used in the project is included? This info is available in Erels Google document and it would assure you are using the latest versions. Even a 'quick' download 'all new or newer' versions in the library manager could be nice.
Alwaysbusy