Meeting Compliance Check point 2 for B4X

1

I use B4X (RAD tool) app (from Anywhere Software) to write Android apps. B4X allows the easy creation of apps (developed in it for Android) to be multi-platform (i.e. IOS, Windows, Linux). B4A (acronym for Basic4Android) by the same owner/author was just for Android apps’ development.

Points 1 & 2 in the ‘Prepare and compliance check’ section in Submitting to F-Droid Quick Start Guide | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository state that a “FOSS licence file is required and there must only be FOSS dependencies” and “If a proprietary IDE is required then it can’t be included.”.

I asked the owner of Anywhere Software (and author of B4X) about whether B4X met the above requirements His reply was:
“B4A framework is open source. The IDE and compiler aren’t.
With that said, I don’t think that there is a relation between B4A being open source or not and F-Droid. You can make open source apps with B4X.
No plans to open source the IDE for now (and it also depends on third party non-open source components).
The generated Java source code can be open sourced and built with open source tools without relying on the IDE or B4A compiler. I don’t know whether it meets their requirements or not.”.

If Android apps developed by B4X were allowed into F-Droid (since Java presumably meets the above Compliance Check and the Java code generated by B4X is FOSS) it would be helpful to non-professional developers like me. I don’t want to jump through the hoops required by Google to put apps onto its Play Store, especially as I don’t charge for any my apps to be used by others.

2

so the source is Java and FLOSS and can be build without proprietary IDEs or binaries?

3

Java code is generated by using the proprietary IDE in B4X.

4

basic principle of foss is that the source must be avaialbale in “preferred form”, that is the form that is most comfortable to work with and reason about, so that would be the B4X code not the generated Java, and that would then require their proprietary compiler.

5

I’d disagree somewhat

6

In what way(s) do you disagree?

7

There’s still a source to build and inspect

8

omg what a discovery, we now have a way to turn every program into a foss program, just decompile it and you would have have source code that you can build and inspect, problem solved

i literally gave you a term to look up, how hard can it be

9

Please forgive my possible misunderstanding. AFAIK Java is a language which is compiled into ‘binary’ code that the Android OS understands and is able to run. So Java is source code though not as easy to understand as using the B4X IDE with it’s B4A/B4X code in conjunction with the screen layouts created by the B4A Designer (part of the B4X/B4A ‘environment’).

10

whatever language you write it in is what is concidered source code, to how many intermediate languages it gets translated to before getting to actually run doesn’t really matter, none of those are concidered source code anymore in that context