Wincent Strings Util

Today I’m announcing a new product that may be of interest to developers, Wincent Strings Utility, which is a derivative of Omni Development’s stringsUtil. This is a tool that I have been using in-house for some time as part of my localization process, but I’ve decided to release it publicly now in preparation for some things to come.

The things to come…

I have been thinking about releasing some software under the GPL and in order to do so I have been moving some scripts and tools that I use in my build chain into a special "buildtools" package. There’s not much point in releasing GPLed software if you don’t also provide the tools to conveniently build it; hence buildtools. The idea is that the buildtools package will also be released under the GPL.

Now, Omni’s Source Code is not licensed under the GPL so I cannot roll my derived work into buildtools, but I do have to make the strings utility available in some way or another. Their license does not allow the distribution of modified source code, but they do allow modified binaries to be distributed provided that you change their name (which is why I named the executable wincent-strings-util), and they also allow you to distribute patches, so I’ve done that too.