Summary of Phix licence.
For more details see the manual (included with the download).
Free for all personal and open source use.
Phix itself is licenced as "enforced open source". This means you absolutely cannot ship a pre-built closed source executable created from the compiler sources. Obtaining and installing a licence code does not change that fact. You are however at liberty to redistribute modified compiler sources, so "p -cp" must be run to complete the installation - you can modify ppw.bat, replacing "p -pw" with "p -cp", and run phixzip.bat to create a redistributable windows installer that does it automatically. Such a recompilation finishes here in under 10 seconds, and 55s on a 1997 vintage 150MHz, btw.
I make no attempt to follow to the letter any existing "open source" or similar licencing terms from FSF/OSS/GPL/etc, but adhere to the spirit in terms of freedom, individual empowerment and flexibility.
Registration (currently free, fast, and painless) is required to ship pre-built executables, obviously/only really needed for closed source applications.
- Run pgui.exe (or "p pgui") and click on "Register Now".
- The registration page should open, with the registration request code in the windows clipboard.
- Paste into the top box, optionally enter a name and email address, and press submit.
- Select and copy the contents of the lower box into the windows clipboard.
- Switch back to pgui.exe, the message "Success", "Licence verified" should immediately appear, you can press the "Test" button to repeat this.
- Phix is now registered for that specific machine, and a licence.txt file has been created.
Executables built without first obtaining a licence code will run fine on the machine they were created on, but issue a "licence error" on any other.
Licencing is not based on trust but a degree of technical wizardy, backed up by good old fashioned tedium. While it should take no special skills to find and defeat the toplevel licence error message, shown above, another exists that occurs less often, and is therefore harder to find, followed by more levels even less likely to trigger, and so on.
Licences do not expire but may need to be replaced when a new version is downloaded.
Ultimately I reserve the right to start charging for commercial use of Phix, but have no immediate plans to do so.
Note that the licencing mechanism deliberately cripples compiler/interpreter functionality, and hence some application features, eg allowing user-defined scripting, via the methods Phix uses, as opposed to hll methods as used by say eu.ex from RDS, may doom an application to being released as open source or not at all.
While the existing assembly back-end is and will forever remain closed source, I invite and encourage gradual migration in bite-sized chunks to hll/#ilasm and properly tested and peer reviewed form. I will of course provide copies of the relevant code, in a non-compilable form, for such translation. Should sufficient bodies volunteer to make this happen, the existing backend may shrink to the point where it can completely disappear. Relatively recent examples of such migration include c_func and c_proc.