doc article

Nice to get to meet one of the hard workers for JMRI. Nice also to find out Bob Jacobsen has a personal debt that we can help pay down by contributing to JMRI. I will be making a contributio.

DCC Impulses March 2015

This was a long overdue discussion about the people behind the JMRI scenes.  These guys give countless hours of their time to develop and improve the code plus they spend many more hours in the chat room answering questions and helping the rest of us learn how to use this great program.  Hats off to you Bruce for doing this.  I look forward to the next installment and hearing from some of the other developers whom I follow every day.

JMRI: More than DecoderPro - Is "Freeware" free?

I just read Bruce Petrarca's excellent interview with Bob Jacobsen.  Enjoyed a quick review on the history of JMRI.  I've been a user nearly the beginning.

Every JMRI user should read the article, especially the answers to these 3 questions:

You were part of a landmark legal settlement involving software rights. Would you explain, please?

What were the financial impacts of this lawsuit and upon whom?

Since this benefited the group, how can JMRI users help? (Emphasis added)

JMRI is "Freeware," but not without a significant cost.  I encourage every JMRI user go to http://www.jmri.org and make a donation. Consider marking your calendar to make another donation in the future. 

We, the users, need to make Bob Jacobsen "whole" from the legal expenses he has born for our benefit; and pay the continuing expenses necessary for continued JMRI development.

Kind Regards,

Ross

Bob Jacobsen

I might point out that not only the JMRI users benefited from Mr. Jacobsen's lawsuit but the Open Source community as well. "This landmark case was a huge victory for free and open source/open source software developers, it was the first time decisions of this kind were made in a court of law, the conclusions reached have set the legal precedent, and developers can forever contribute to software projects knowing that their rights will be protected." http://www.sherweb.com/blog/5-pivotal-open-source-lawsuits/

The extent of JMRI

On the JMRIUSERS Yahoo group, Dennis Miller recently posted about using Source Lines of Code as a measure of the complexity of JMRI. He used a Linux utility to test just the basic engine, not the decoder definitions, or help files, or any of the ancillary items.

He found:

JMRI

Good artiticle. Very informative. Keep up the good work