Releasing a New Version of Frontier

I work as a ServiceNow developer and spend my workday creating cloud applications with a lot of other programmers. When I write my own software in my spare time in Java, PHP and other languages, I've begun to miss the collaboration I experience at work. Having other eyeballs on my code is making me a better programmer.

In that spirit, I want to do more of my homebrew programming out in the open on my GitHub account under open source licenses.

I have a lot of old websites and other data I can't do anything with because they're contained in root files, the database format used by UserLand Frontier and related applications. Frontier is open source and after some tinkering I was able to get it to compile successfully in Microsoft Visual Studio.

There used to be a site for ongoing development of Frontier but it folded. Ted Howard also has his own Frontier release, but that has gone quiet in recent years.

This weekend I launched a new GitHub repo for Frontier in the hopes it might grow into something useful, particularly for Windows users since Howard's fixes have been focused on MacOS.

I'm going to start with cosmetic changes to make clear that it's a GPL-licensed open source release. Frontier doesn't currently fulfill this requirement of GPL 2.0:

If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode: "Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) year name of author Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type 'show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type 'show c' for details.

After that I'd like to ensure that all outbound and inbound Internet connections are being logged. Back when I regularly used Frontier I was never comfortable not knowing every server it was communicating with.

I don't know how much work I'll be doing in an old C codebase with several hundred thousand lines of code, but having my own version might give me some ideas for how to use the platform and the software and sites I created for it.

Frontier · Github · Userland · 2021/03/14 · 0 COMMENTS · Link