Re: Dia

[Alejandro Imass <aimass yabarana com>]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 6:47 PM, Sheehan, John T <jsheehan ptc com> wrote:

Hi folks, my name is John Sheehan and I am a software developer. Tim (cc’ed here) and I are looking at Dia as a sketch tool to recommend to our customers.

Our product is Mathcad and our clients (engineers of every discipline)  live on free body diagrams. We’re not going to build a sketcher, and then there is Dia, perfect we tell our customers to use Dia and all are happy. Except one wrinkle

 

DIA runs on many platforms making clipboard "work" should be a problem but it will most likely be specific to your OS, I'm guessing Windows. 

Clipboard actually works, just locally to DIA, to make it work beyond that would require specific target OS clipboard implementation for example what is the expected interchange format between those apps in that particular OS, probably WMF, WEM, or something like that. 

You will also need to check the license. In general you will not be able to link directly to any proprietary software or library so this may be an issue to implement  the clipboard on a non open source OS. You will not be able to redistribute the software unless you comply with the license terms and will probably need to provide your users with a mechanism to download and modify the software themselves if they want to. If you publish your changes back to the DIA project you will have practically no issues and if done correctly should find their way to the native Windows binary more popularly available from http://dia-installer.de

You can of course create your own distribution which is perfectly legal but you will also need to provide a way for users to download your source and enhancements which could later be forked or merged to the DIA project itself or any other Open Source project.

If in doubt see COPYING file the source code. Most law firms are very familiar with GPL v2 nowadays.

 

Best,

Alex