As someone who’s right on the line between an ENTP and an ENTJ… let me tell you, there is a plan here, though not one I could articulate, even to myself (never mind anything like a company meeting over Signal) until recently.
Of course we don’t and oughtn’t depend on “the magic Open Source fairy” to fix things, especially without some significant investment first and foremost from our side, and certainly not without a plan.
The idea of producing/giving away/selling binary Unicode and 64-bit versions of the Paige code came from two of our developers (one of whom is no longer with us, for cause). The idea of giving away the source is mine, and I allocated the Paige file to one specific employee (the one who’d suggested 64-bit Paige in the first place), but only to the extent necessary to get our core product (which we’re hoping to 64-bitify) out the door. Additional effort would have to come from the community.
Now, in any sane world, I’d be able to order this employee to make himself a GitHub account and regularly push code to Git—but I’m afraid there would be some major blowback if I did that and then had to make some other hard decision (this person is deeply distrustful of the distributed version control paradigm and point-blank refuses to learn Git).
On the other hand, he’s openly told me that he’s OK with letting me merge contributions on his behalf (obviously with credit). So I think we’ve got a pretty solid plan of action.
Given that I own the copyright in right of my company, there is nothing legally preventing me from re-licensing it (either in general or for the use of the Haiku project). As long as I’m kept abreast of which licence(s) are acceptable for Haiku purposes, I would and will happily do this.
I’ll bring in my colleague (or, more likely, act as go-between). This wasn’t meant to be a one-person job anyway.