So the WURFL group became Scentia Mobile, and along with the change eventually followed stricter and stricter licensing. As it stands now, there’s no way to use the newer versions of the WURFL xml file in the public sphere, outside of using Scientia-provided APIs.
In other words mobile device browser cannot be updated using new official WURFL data.
I’d hoped that Luca and the Scientia people would’ve protected their GPL community at the very least given the project’s community-sourced roots. Alas, there’s money to be made in all of this and principles are always the first thing to go.
Tags: mobile device browser, scentia mobile, wurfl
Hi, Luca of WURFL and ScientiaMobile here.
The WURFL API is released as AGPL, so I am not sure what you mean when you say that the GPL community is not protected.
Also, what you call “money to be made” I would call “making WURFL self-sustainable” which it has not been over the years (money were invested over the years, without an adequate ROI from the community that found value in WURFL. This includes large enterprises and Fortune 500 companies too).
Plenty of commercial companies have taken a free ride on WURFL without ever returning anything. I have a hard time recalling that many were vocal about this…
Anyway, now that I, Steve and others have decided to drop everything we were doing before to do WURFL as our main and only job, WURFL adopters should be happy about this.
More info here:
http://www.scientiamobile.com/support
Luca