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So we’ve always planned to make the source code available for Buttercup. Now it’s time to think a bit more about how exactly we go about that. Given the nature of the project there are a few things to think about.

We’ve really got two key goals that we’re looking to achieve by shipping the source.

1. We want people to learn from our code and be able to make their own Silverlight apps accessible. This probably won’t involve reuse of a lot of our code, but, it will probably see you pouring through the app getting ideas.
2. We want Buttercup to live on, grow and continue to be developed. To get this to happen we really need to build up a bit of a community of enthusiasts to work on it. That’ll involve some of the original team but it’s going to need a bunch of ‘new blood’ to help drive things along too.

So my current thinking is to release the source code via a CodePlex project. We (the Intergen team) will probably take the role of project administrators for the first wee while and will probably look to vet initial patches into the source tree. We’ll then look to bring on other developers and project leaders nice and quickly.

So I’ve got a few questions for our interested community.

1. Shall we make the code available now? Or should we wait until we’ve ported it to Silverlight 3.0?
2. What licences do you prefer? I’d like to use one of the OSI approved licenses and ideally something that is not Copyleft. Current leanings are BSD, Modified MIT and MS-PL. But I’d love to hear from the community interested in Buttercup what your thoughts are.
3. Are you interested in being involved in the on-going development of Buttercup? It’s a Silverlight 2.0 application written in C#.

Please use the comments to provide some feedback. We look forward to hearing from you.