Tim Canfer

I finished a synth tutorial made with max a while back and want to make it available; release it for universal use / download online and was looking at putting it under GNU license.

Please can anyone tell me, do I need do anything in particular to the app/exe i.e. make the source code available, (and if so how would I do that? At the moment I can just about create a mac and pc standalone version which work on various machines).

I had hoped that I could simply include the txt file for the license and put a copyright notice in the about tab.

On an aside, I am planning to upload to archive.net and point my blog to it - would this be the best idea?

I finished a synth tutorial made with max a while back and want to make it available; release it for universal use / download online and was looking at putting it under GNU license. 

Please can anyone tell me, do I need do anything in particular to the app/exe i.e. make the source code available, (and if so how would I do that?  At the moment I can just about create a mac and pc standalone version which work on various machines). 

releasing-with-gnu

Basically, a source distribution should contain everything needed to recreate the application from scratch, i.e. patcher files and other code.

It is customary to label GNU GPL-licensed source code with a copyright notice and a short notice that the code is released under GPL. Your main project folder should contain a file named "Licence" or "Copying", containing the full text of your licence, available at 

If you want other people to be able to use your code without restrictions, consider using an MIT or BSD-style licence rather than GPL. See

There are tons of site that host free and open source software. Many of these are project sites focusing on collaborative projects and providing tools such as version control SVN/CVS, mailing lists, web hosting etc. Here are some:

It is customary to label GNU GPL-licensed source code with a copyright notice and a short notice that the code is released under GPL. Your main project folder should contain a file named "Licence" or "Copying", containing the full text of your licence, available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt

If you want other people to be able to use your code without restrictions, consider using an MIT or BSD-style licence rather than GPL. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license

There are tons of site that host free and open source software. Many of these are project sites focusing on collaborative projects and providing tools such as version control SVN/CVS, mailing lists, web hosting etc. Here are some:
http://www.sourceforge.net
http://code.google.com
http://github.com


Thanks for the advice - that is great - actually I like the idea of copyleft so I will go for the GNU license, but the other two are interesting.

Would a good idea to be to have standalone versions for mac and pc, a max collective version and then a folder of the elements that make up the program (polys, images, aiffs etc)? Would that count as the source files?

- could anyone recommend a good site for hosting - or are they all pretty similar (should I not use archive.net?)

I don't think collectives can be seen as source files. You need the original patchers to make modifications. For the non-source distribution, standalones is the way to go.

Ok - thanks, I'll need make sure that all patchers and other files are in the elements folder - do you know if I need to maintain the existing paths for the files within the patches folder (i.e. the images are in a subfolder of the picts folder)?

Thanks again - if anyone has any recommendations about a site to host I would appreciate it.

Definitely keep the paths correct if at all possible. These might be different between the standalones and the patches. Possibly the "path" message to [thispatcher] can help, as might the "sendapppath" message to Max. Either way, these are good to know about for path-related issues in general.

Collectives are "kind of" source files, as everything is in there, but depending on how complex everything is, it's tougher to reverse-engineer them through copy/paste from the "patcher" bits in the .mxf. Open your .mxf as text to see how this works. So, the .maxpats themselves are really the source files, which end users can open right away.

how do i get the source code from my max app .. i dont get this question ... the

source is your maxmsp project ... nothing easier than that.

archive.net ... archive.org probably ... yes ... their hosting is the only one i would

recommend (forgive me but sites like sourceforge are unusable) but then again,

archive.org recently has decided to introduce censorship ... so they are out of

how do i get the source code from my max app .. i dont get this question ... the
source is your maxmsp project ... nothing easier than that.

archive.net ... archive.org probably ... yes ... their hosting is the only one i would
recommend (forgive me but sites like sourceforge are unusable)  but then again,
archive.org recently has decided to introduce censorship ... so they are out of
question now ... just an opinion ...

Sorry about the delay - I've been offline - no internet at the campsite unfortunately!

I was not aware that the source code was the project, I had worrying notions of having to create machine code or some such madness... Thanks for clarifying.

Sorry - yes, of course I meant archive.org - so archive.org would be the least bad, or not?

Machine code is actually the opposite of souce code ;). It is the excecutable you get from compiling a C program for instance.

And a patch isn't compiled, it's interpreted... it runs within the Runtime or Max environment, which itself is a compiled executable, whose job it is to interpret patches and handle their processes.

Patches are just lists of executable objects, connected together as you've defined. The list gets written in JSON text that's generated and modified as you add and change things. So it's kind of a unique way to program, with a unique kind of code---you don't write if/then statements or for loops directly, the objects you've included *create* these behaviors by how they're connected and by the messages that flow between them.

At least that's how I understand it... :)

Releasing (with GNU)?