I sat down to work on the search bar I was talking of in my post yesterday and what do you know, by the end of the day I actually had a working version of the app! It’s still a bit rough around the edges but it is basically a desktop toolbar (so it works with any version of IE with ActiveDesktop – I think … but I don’t think it works under NT 4.0 but maybe I’m wrong …) so everybody might not be able to use it 🙁 Anyway, it’s a toolbar which will sit on your taskbar and will simply provide you with a edit box into which you can type in search criteria and a shortcut which defines search engines like Google, IMDB etc. I’m calling the app Quester and it seems to be coming along pretty nicely but development is pain because it is an ActiveX server and once you load it, I can’t seem to unload it unless you logout of the system – that means I have to log out each time I want to do a new build to fix a bug … Oh well ..
I do need to write to the author of the original app based on which I wrote Quester because I’m using almost the same XML file format he used and am basically “borrowing” his list of search engines. He released his app (which was simply an HTML file and an XML file) under the GPL but I don’t want to release the source for Quester and so I am not sure about where I stand – I didn’t borrow any code from him but where does XML info stand in the scheme of the GPL? I am really not sure and if there is a problem, I don’t want to release Quester publicly but I do find it to be a pretty neat app – if I do say so myself :p
I am not a lawyer, but…
My understanding of the GPL is that you have to make the source available for the parts of the project that are GPL’d ie. if you use the same XML file, you have to make the XML freely available (which is difficult not to…)
I’ve been using Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar since I first read about it over a month ago, and I love it (in fact, I even contributed some searches to it) so I’m wondering what you’ve added to make it different – other than default browser support (which people seem to want – from reading the mailing list)
The other aspect of the GPL is that you only have to make the source available to anyone that you make the application available to. I could be wrong on that though, I don’t really know my law at all – squeaked by Business Law with a mid 60’s grade.
Greg