Seeing how legacy and current open-source applications seem to supercede closed-source applications as any member of the community is allowed to contribute to the development, as opposed to a few selected members, I propose that mIRC be made open-source and released under the GNU GPL. Financial support can be generated from donations from dedicated users, instead of forcing people to pay after a certain duration of use. This will allow mIRC to be developed at a much faster rate, allowing it to keep consistent with other applications of its kind. Needless to say, it's laughably easy to pirate mIRC and register a version with a keygen application.

Unless someone would like to counteract my argument with valid points, I don't see any disadvantages to either party (developers or users) here.

From Khaled's FAQ:

Question: Will you be releasing the mIRC source code under CopyLeft/GPL at some point?
Answer: I might, however mIRC is the way I make a living. It only happened by chance, and I've always expected to move on at some point, but it's still hard to give that up.

Another issue is that I've worked on mIRC for many years according to a set of personal beliefs that I know would be inappropriate or inapplicable to others if I release the source code. In an environment that's as commercial as Windows, that's difficult to accept.

Regards,

I have read that, and I took his points into consideration. However, the current development applications (example, CVS and Subversion) make open-source development easy and reliable, allowing the prime developers to keep the project under control.

As for making a "living", as I mentioned, donations are a reliable source of financial support, and people wouldn't pirate mIRC to avoid paying.

Donations aren't a reliable source of income by any means. Have you tried donations on a large project? Very rarely do you get many.

I think the above quote gives you an answer. Not agreeing with it doesn't make it a less applicable answer

I personally wouldn't want to see mIRC go open source until Khaled officially stops developing it. After that, I'd encourage it to be open source rather than let it rot in cyberspace for the next decade.

Regards,

IMO it should remain closed source, because im sure not many of us would want to see 500 different mIRC's and most of them infected with a virus of some sort.

You're right, there are 500 firefox's with infections floating around too. </sarcasm>

*general reply*

I would love mIRC to become open source, but I don't see it happening any time soon (if at all)

Open source projects superceding proprietary ones isn't by any means a given, mIRC itself is a prime example of that (open source IRC clients aren't a new thing yet in total their usage as IRC users' main clients comes to about 5%). I'm confident that one day mIRC will become open source, but I don't think it'll happen while Khaled relies on it as his primary source of income. It's all very easy to say "just take donations, there's no disadvantage" when you're not the one who's livelihood would be put on the line. Seeing the occasional open source project which is financially successful make headlines (even if only Slashdot's) makes it very easy to forget that for each one of them there are 1000 or more which fail miserably or just barely get by.

There's a small flaw with your argument. mIRC is extremly popular with its target audience. Firefox is not and if you wanted to knuckle into security issues, Firefox is the subject of more security advisories than mIRC will ever be.

I'm not suggesting that an open-source mIRC would become a haven for people to take an undesirable advantage of. It's easy enough to do that already with mIRC's scripting power and people become victims of that every day and there are open-source programmes out there. But because of mIRCs popularity there is an attraction for trouble none-the-less.

Personally, I would like to see mIRC's current author continue development, for a while longer at least. However we all have to remember something: nothing lasts forever. People's lives change, people move on, they do different things and set new goals for themselves. Another thing that no-one seems to notice too is this: mIRC is already a good programme and does its job well. While continued development can only be a good thing, is it the end of the world if there was never another new version?

For the people that still swear by the client, yes.
For others they will probably move on to a different client that has surpassed mIRC.

Perhaps.... I've never seen another client I could compare with mIRC. Besides, all my scripts wouldn't work. I don't know that I'd change clients just because mIRC didn't have another version released. At least not for probably a few years or more.