2 years ago, Lightworks made a promise to the open source community.  A promise that has made them darlings of the open source spotlight.  A promise that the have yet to fulfill.  One blogger takes serious issue with this lack of fullfilment, and rightly so.  Blogger Nekohayo offers in depth insight into the failed promises of Editshare.

What’s interesting here is where Nekohayo points his finger.  In this case, his finger is pointed squarely on a lie they’ve been telling.  The lie of being open source.

From the post:

EditShare announcedtwo years ago their intention to make Lightworks “open-source” someday, and that’s it. They have never released any source code since then. A code drop was planned for 2011 and it was postponed indefinitely. Calling Lightworks an “award-winning open-source video editor” currently is a lie. Even if they do open-source it someday, until the very day they do so, that statement remains a lie. Such a statement can only be a “truth” when you start saying it after the source code has actually been released under an open-source license.

He certainly has a point.  You can’t call your project open source prematurely.  Doing so would naturally make potential users eager to see the code.  But in this case, Nekohayo claims that they’ve been able to ride the open source publicity train due to journalistic ignorance masking their inability to deliver.  He doesn’t go so far as to say that this has all been a publicity stunt, since that has yet to be seen.  Though it certainly seems that way from this writer’s vantage point.

His words:

However, after all these years, most of the blogs or news sites (including the most popular ones) still don’t bother checking for factual accuracy and just blindly accept what corporate press releases tell them they should believe. I would have thought they would have woken up and grown more careful with time, but the situation has generally not improved, to the point where I am now compelled to say this now, officially, in public: Lightworks is currently not open-source and never has been. Furthermore, if it ever is open-sourced,it most likely won’t be anywhere close to a truly open project.

 What do you guys think?  Let us know in the comments.

Source | Nekohayo!