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CCRP General Development Policies
Tuesday, January 06, 2004

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CCRP FAQ Index

Policy on Distribution of Source Code
25th February 1998
The CCRP Team
Copyright © 1998-2004 Common Controls Replacement Project

   
CCRP control source code is not available. The following, taken from a newsgroup post, attempts to explain this policy:

>I was just wondering why there is a CCRP policy
>that says not to publish source code?
>
>What harm do you expect it will do, and why?


Ok, I'll try to explain. It basically comes down to the binary compatibility of the controls.

Suppose that at the same time as placing the control on our website for download, we place the complete project up there as well. Someone downloads the project and decides to change something in it - a bug fix, add a feature etc. They then do a compile and whilst they may maintain binary compatibility with the original OCX, any releases we make after that will not be binary compatible with their OCX. Now suppose that lots of people do this - the end result is complete chaos.

Remember the huge problems that MS caused when they shipped an updated comctl32.ocx that was not binary compatible with the previous version (and that was within their company)? Projects can be broken instantaneously if someone installs an binary incompatible OCX onto a system so if you were to install two different apps that used one of our controls and the author of one had modified and recompiled, then it is more than likely that the app(s) would be broken. Therefore, we decided that we would not release the source.

I hope this explains our policy.

The CCRP Team.