===========================================
Whence - SoftWire - where it all came from.
===========================================
Home page
  https://gna.org/projects/softwire/
    Nicolas Capens <c0d1f1ed>
    Sebastien Metrot <meeloo>
    Frank Richter <res>
    Marten Svanfeldt <thebolt>

CVS tarball
  http://cvs.gna.org/daily/softwire.tar.gz

Downloads
  http://download.gna.org/softwire/SoftWire.zip
  http://download.gna.org/softwire/SoftWire-64.zip

Browse CVS
  http://cvs.gna.org/cvsweb/?cvsroot=softwire

Old home page
  http://softwire.sourceforge.net
    SoftWire and swShader are now owned by TransGaming Technologies
    Inc. You will automatically be redirected to
    http://www.transgaming.com/products/swiftshader/ in 3 seconds.
    If your browser doesn't automatically load, click HERE.

Old Project page
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/softwire
    Project Admins: c0d1f1ed, gavriels
    Operating System: 32-bit MS Windows (95/98), All 32-bit MS Windows
    (95/98/NT/2000/XP), All POSIX (Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes), Linux,
    Other Operating Systems
    License: GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
    Category: 3D Rendering, Code Generators, Compilers (Suggest?)

  User ID: 628186
  Login Name: c0d1f1ed
  Publicly Displayed Name:  Nicolas Capens
  Email Address:  c0d1f1ed@users.sourceforge.net
  Site Member Since: 10/12/2002

  User ID: 9126
  Login Name: gavriels
  Publicly Displayed Name:  Gavriel State
  Email Address:  gavriels@users.sourceforge.net
  Site Member Since: 01/26/2000

Relevant news items
  http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1371369&forum_id=184692
  ---------------------------------------
  Why has the SF.net project been purged?
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Sebastien Metrot (meeloo) - 2005-10-21 07:46
    I have just learned that softwire and swShader has been acquired by
    transgaming. While I can understand Nicolas' motivations to keep the
    forthcoming versions of his work proprietary I don't see any reason to kill
    the original projects. Once the source has been released under the LGPL one
    can not revoque the licence retroactivelly, so I have downloaded ALL the
    existing source tarballs from the servers that still have it and I plan to put
    them on some server (for example gna.org where my other OSS projects are) in
    order to keep the ball rolling on this great project. Is anyone interested?
  ---------------------------------------
  By: RAZOR (razorunreal) - 2005-10-21 15:10
    I'm personally not too concerned whether the projects continue to be
    developed, softwire is an excellent tool for me as it stands. I would prefer,
    however, if they stayed online so others can make use of them too. I'm sure
    there are people who will.

    And Nicolas: Firstly, congratulations. Secondly, thanks. Random note, I
    learned assembly just to use softwire :-).
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Nicolas Capens (c0d1f1ed) - 2005-10-21 11:53
    Hi Sebastien,

    It is hard to have a commercial product while there is still an open-source
    project. So to clearly break between the two we had to take these measures.
    Any further development on swShader would be bad for TransGaming's
    SwiftShader.

    While it's probably your legal right to take the last LGPL code and use it for
    a new project, I hope you're realistic about the possibilities. Over the years
    of swShader's development I recieved only about five lines of contributed
    code. And I spent nearly all of my 'free time' on its development. So to "keep
    the ball rolling" you will need to find a way to motivate contributors to work
    on this complex project. Or you or another individual would have to spend a
    lot of time on it. But then maybe it becomes more useful to work on
    SwiftShader...

    So, I don't want to discourage you, in fact I wish you all the luck. But the
    evolution from swShader to SwiftShader was really very natural. The swShader
    project has been completely inactive for about a year and now that it has been
    almost entirely removed you wish to start contributing? With all respect, I
    don't understand your goals...

    Sincerely,

    Nicolas Capens
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Sebastien Metrot (meeloo) - 2005-10-21 16:11
    Hi Nicolas,

    I think softwire is probably stable enough for many people to continue using
    it even if there isn't any new new developement on it. I have started hacking
    an equivalent of softwire for the PPC some month ago and one of my goals was
    to end up merging it with softwire one of those days. Another goal is to make
    sure that softwire works well with Apple's new developer transition systems.

    The swiftAsm and swiftShader announcement reveals that you made a breakthrough
    and that they are much better than their original OSS version. If that is the
    case then I don't really understand why there is such an urge to kill the
    project.

    On a side note I was kinda disapointed as I've been a big fan of softwire and
    I have read many of your posts about rasterizing and asm tricks on developpers
    forum and I naively thought that I would be able to profit from your wisdom a
    bit longer than that :-).

    I'm not too much interested in swShader personnaly as I'm mainly doing Audio
    programming. However I imagine that it is a good idea to keep the sources
    available for reference and learning new tricks from the gurus...
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Xepo Epicmoon (xepo) - 2005-10-21 08:39
    I'm interested. Though, why GNA instead of just starting another SF project?
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Sebastien Metrot (meeloo) - 2005-10-21 16:15
    Well, the first reason would be that we will not be able to create a
    "softwire" and "swShader" project on SF.net as the name is already taken by
    the deprecated project. Unless Nicolas would let us do it of course. I was
    just naming gna as a possible solution. I have suffered from the quirks of
    SF.net and Savanah in the past so I moved to gna which is much smaller but
    very stable. Also two of the GNA admins are very good friends of mine (I'm not
    sure if that counts as a + or a - ;-) ).
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Nicolas Capens (c0d1f1ed) - 2005-10-22 17:17
    As a backup I would recommend to use:
    http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/softwire
    http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sw-shader

    Please understand that not much has changed. The projects have been inactive
    for very long, I just removed the development page. I hope you still
    appreciate the backups.
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Sebastien Metrot (meeloo) - 2005-10-22 19:56
    Yes, I have already downloaded a backup of these files as I don't know how
    long they will stay available once the official download section have been
    emptied. One thing that is still missing is the tutorial page. I guess I'll be
    able to salvage it from the google cache or something, in order to provide a
    complete zip with the sources and the docs.

    Thanks
  ---------------------------------------
  By: RAZOR (razorunreal) - 2005-10-22 21:12
    Wasn't the tutorial out of date? And I know pretty much nothing about legal
    stuff, but would you be within your rights to distribute it anyway?
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Xepo Epicmoon (xepo) - 2005-10-22 23:46
    Ahh, thanks for helping; that's quite nice of ya, since you have commercial
    interest in us not succeeding.
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Klaus Post (sh0dan) - 2005-10-27 03:58
    Bummer :(

    Sorry that your new employee cannot see the benefit of keeping softwire open.

    Guess we'll have to develop an x86-64 version ourselves! :(
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Sebastien Metrot (meeloo) - 2005-11-21 22:01
    Hi :)

    Ok, I got the approval from gna and the project is registered there. I'll
    start uploading the sources of all the tarballs to the cvs repository as soons
    as possible. The project page is here: https://gna.org/projects/softwire/
    Meanwhile you can subscribe to two mailling list:
    softwire-commit will receive a commit repport for any cvs operation.
    softwire-devel is the discussion ML where all the parties interested in the
    developpement of softwire can meet and talk.

    See you there!
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Paul Sokolovsky (pfalcon) - 2006-09-12 02:23
    Except that project GNA project is (still? yet? already?) empty. Was there
    some behind-the-schenes communication we should know around?

    Otherwise, there's nothing wrong with author's position, it's really the
    community interest what judges success of open-source project and if community
    is not interested in even upkeep of software given to it, let it be that way.
    Nothing wrong, I mean, if they don't violate formal an ethical aspects of GPL.
  ---------------------------------------
  By: Nicolas Capens (c0d1f1ed) - 2006-09-12 21:24
    The GNA SoftWire projec is not empty, it's just only accessible with CVS.

    But there has also been some communication on the mailing list. In just a
    couple weeks I will start a new dynamic code generation project for my
    Master's thesis. It will be [insert favorite superlative here] than SoftWire
    and include every feature ever asked for. It will be open-source but the
    license might be a little more restrictive than LGPL...
  ---------------------------------------
