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noname

Member

Registered: 2019-09-25

Posts: 16  

need some help from my friends (FOSS development, Git, similar)

Greetings and salivations.

I've been "around" for a long while.  But the thing with linux (pardon me saying this please) is that to really use it, you have to learn it all, and i've been learning just the bits that i've needed so far.  Many of them have changed from release to release, like the output of the mount command which changed... maybe 5 years ago, thus emphasizing the ill-advised nature of parsing command output.

Anyway I have too many projects and not enough time.  The most important of these is something i'm calling Hoss.  It's a... a lot of things, based on a new "hierarchical ontological-semantics" database, which is basically just another filesystem.  The thing about Hoss is, i want to make it freely available like all good FOSS applications, but... it will contain some chunks that i want to keep proprietary... not to hide secrets, but to make sure that when someone uses the resulting distro, they're using the approved/blessed/intended distro, not something hacked up to be unsafe.

It *seems* like i could do this by careful interface partitioning, so that the proprietary code is something external that runs on-top-of Hoss, but i'm not a lawyer.  Google et-all have been doing something like that, because we'uns don't have all the good stuff they've written on top of linux, because if we did, it would be mortally stupid not to have included it in Devuan or upstream.

Anyway it's about time for me to learn Git.  Is there anything "wrong" with placing engineering drawings on github?  I'm also building a smart-tiny-home controller for offgrid use; although i'll offer it as a product, i want full engineering diagrams/specs to be freely available, so that anyone who doesn't want to pay me outrageously to solder stuff together, can just order the parts and do it themselves.  Building physical stuff and shipping it is a mortal PITA especially if the customer lives outside the US due to customs tightening since 9/11, and i'd prefer to spend my time not-soldering.

I'm not asking for anyone to help write code.  Though there will be things later that i'll need to learn somehow, like directly accessing the linux framebuffer, digging the longhand-arithmetic routines out of PHP, things like that.

Mostly what i need is some guidance in how to legally structure a FOSS application so that it can include proprietary chunks.

And suggestions about using something like github to store engineering drawings.

If any of y'all would care to weigh in, i'd appreciate the company.  And if anyone out there wants to get stinking rich, this could be a way of getting from point-A to point-B without sacrificing ethics (or of wasting a whole bunch of time).

TIA for whatever.

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,486  

Re: need some help from my friends (FOSS development, Git, similar)

Graphics files can be part of a git project just like any other files. For example, go into the backgrounds folder here - https://git.devuan.org/devuan-packages/desktop-base - and click on one of the .png files.

noname

Member

Registered: 2019-09-25

Posts: 16  

Re: need some help from my friends (FOSS development, Git, similar)

Graphics files can be part of a git project just like any other files. For example, ....

Yes, blobs of various sorts are needed for *software* projects; maybe what i'm asking is whether github (is it still the recommended repository?) is restricted to *software* projects alone, or if for example, blueprints for building a tiny-house,, as part of a construction project, would be accepted like anything else, or if they'd cause some problem?