Netbeans 6 Dual-Licensed Under GPLv2, CDDL

Lally Singh writes "Interested in the new Netbeans 6, but didn't trust Sun's (already OSI-approved) CDDL? Sun just Dual-Licensed it under the GPL (v2) with Classpath Exception. Keep your karmic license purity and mix in all the (now compatible) GPL code you want. If you've been using Eclipse, Netbeans 6 is really worth a look. Lean, well-featured, and fast."

Re:Dual license?

[4D6963]

Err, nevermind, the answer's in TFA (people choose the license they want) :-/

Re:Dual license?

[eht]

If it's your code you can license it however you want, for example MySQL is dual licensed under both the GPL and a Commercial license. Anyone can download the GPL version make their modifications and as long as they follow the GPL redistribute according to the GPl, or if they license the commercial version for a fee from MySQL AB they can basically release a closed source version all closed up.

If you were to dual license your code under the GPL and BSD people who wanted to redistribute modified code could follow either one they wanted, with BSD being one of the avaible choices they could close it up a lot if they so desired.

Re:Dual license?

[NevarMore]

In your example, the code derived from it has to be compatible with the GPL license OR the BSD license. Once code is licensed under one or the other its usually hard to go back, but one has to make a choice up front about it.

For example I can take some code I write and release it under GPL and my own for pay license. If someone pays for a copy they and I have to abide by my paid-license, if someone downloads it then they can do things with it as allowed by the GPL. This allows me to be flexible and support the needs of buisnesses (and pay my bills) while still supporting the community.

Re:Only matters for Netbeans mods and add-ons, rig

[bazald]

Right, NetBeans, like GCC, never imposed any license restrictions on the code generated.

Re:Dual license?

[Anonymous Coward]

fork it. for example, a certain program is under GPL, its fork can't be made proprietary. the other fork of that program is under BSD, you can make its particular code proprietary, just because it's the same code now doesn't mean it will always be the same code. they'll go in different directions, one with the benefits to end-users that the GPL provides and the other's core code can still remain open while allowing companies to incorperate it into their software even if they don't open up their own code in this example.

GUI Builder

[rpp3po]

Netbeans is very stable and mature platform. There's nothing to bitch about. Eclipse on the other hand offers much more comfort concerning plain editing and refactoring tasks. Additionally it is part of a much more attractive ecosystem.

Still there is one thing where Netbeans beats every other Java IDE easily: The matisse GUI builder is really fun to work with! For Java there's nothing even close. And for that alone Netbeans has a very well founded raison d'être. If it's GPL now, lets wait and see how long it takes for Eclipse to absorb that great tool. There's already a commercial port for MyEclipse, but it's not free or usable on vanilla Eclipse, yet.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has their own customized version of Sun's JRE, and it tends to visually perform better than the standard Sun JRE - at least, the swing components do. Microsoft had a pretty zippy JRE too, but they got sued and had to stop.

Oh well.

Re:Tried it

[siddesu]

around 25-30 seconds on a mobile pentium @ 1.5GHz (and 1GB RAM).
why?

Re:Dual license?

[Morkano]

You can licence your code however you want, but if you make it conditional like that you could very easily make it incompatible with the licences they're based on, or open up loop holes, or make it not hold up in court or whatever.

The way they do it for MySQL and others is when you get it, only one licence applies. You choose which one you want to apply, but the choice of the commercial licence means you have to give them money. They're just giving you the ability to sell a product and keep the source closed if you're willing to pay for it.

Re:Only matters for Netbeans mods and add-ons, rig

[_merlin]

Visual Basic (pre .NET) and RealBasic place restrictions on the generated code, because the distribution terms have to be compatible with the distribution terms on the runtime engine that the executables will require.

Re:In Iran

[Macrat]

Sun's policy?

Sun is a US company and by US law, Sun is not allowed to export to restricted countries.

Re:differences?

[Spikeles]

Personally my editor for everything textual is Vim

Then you would love this [sourceforge.net] and this [satokar.com]

They wouldn't even for a single license

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL is not "viral". You can use it with non-GPLed code (and it doesn't change the
license on that code) as long as that code doesn't have any restrictions which aren't
in the GPL. The "viral"ness of the GPL is that you can't redistribute it under any other
terms -- including if you make derivative works and distribute those.

The FSF also takes an expansive view toward derivative works of their own software, so
that a program linked with their code, but not otherwise including it, would create a new
work covered by the GPL. The non-GPLed component would still be non-GPL if distributed
by itself. This is why some of their software, like glibc, is under the LGPL.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a NetBeans Problem. It is a JDK 6.0 update 2 and update 3 problem. It takes JFileChooser forever to show up if you have zip files on your desktop or in the directory you are trying to navigate to.
JDK 6.0 update 1 and earlier versions don't have this problem.
here's the bug report for this:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6578753 [sun.com]

Re:GUI Builder

[atehrani]

Not to mention UML (two way), Profiling, Visual Web development, complete JEE support. What comes "out of the box" with Netbeans is impressive. I also find Netbeans far more intuitive than Eclipse (I never liked their perspective concept). Startup can be a bit sluggish, but that's really not a deal breaker. People should honestly try it out; profiling is wonderful! Helps you find your bottlenecks and those pesky resource leaks. For FREE!

Re:differences?

[MemoryDragon]

It depends on the toolchain, bare eclipse is best you can get for java editing second to none. (Well Intellij is also very good but that is a different league) but if you are forced to use the WTP, then Eclipse becomes a major pain. An example, a colleque of mine was using Eclipse he had to move up to Eclipse 3.3. I recommended Europa to him because he was using parts of the toolchain anyway, after Eclipse suddenly refused to given him code insight, he reverted back. Problems like this are myriad with the WTP and if I was forced to use it, I probably would have given up on Eclipse a long while ago. Fortunately there are bearable other options in the Eclipse world, if you want to shell out some money.

Re:Go Competition

[DerekJ212]

2) You can do [esc]:300 to jump to line 300

Actually, I believe [esc]:x will jump ahead x lines from the current, however still very useful.

Re:Dual license?

[AVee]

As said above, you can perfectly do that (within the limits of the law), if it's your code, you get to set the terms. However, such a scenario is not dual-licensing, it's creting a wholly new license (which happens to be based on two other licenses). That very different from dual-licensing where the recieving party get to choose between the licenses. It also is likely very to create a license which is incompatible with both the licenses it is based on.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[VGPowerlord]

-1 Troll???
At what point advocating for free software *on slashdot* became taboo?

He had two moderations, one Troll and one Flamebait.

It's not surprising that a post filled with rhetoric and hyperbole gets those two mods.

At the same time, "el lobo" gets moderated +5 for clearly offtopic and offensive post.

He got moderated Informative for giving information about Windows Licensing in a topic about Windows Licensing. I can't see how anyone but a GNU zealot would find that offensive.

Speaking of Flamebait and Troll mods, don't be surprised if you get some too for the same reasons listed above.

Re:Tried it

[bauerbob]

Take a look into $NETBEANS_DIRECTORY/etc/netbeans.conf and raise the memory settings by factor 3 or 4. The default settings are much too conservative for your computer.

Re:Tried it

[CastrTroy]

But see, that's what happens when your IDE doesn't include any features, and actually requires plug-ins for some basic tasks. A few years ago, I tried to used Eclipse to do up a quick little Java app with a GUI. Apparently, at the time, you could either hand code your GUI or install some buggy plugin that did the job OK, but not quite that well. Or if you used Netbeans, then the drag-and-drop GUI designer was included as a core part of the IDE. IDEs as far as I'm concerned need a lot of functionality, because of their purpose. If their purpose was just typing code, then we could all just settle for notepad, but those who have used a good IDE know that they are so much more than that. So they should include a lot of features as core components that are well tested and well supported, because relying on third party plugins for things that should be core components leads to a very unstable program.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually plain Emacs doesn't do syntax checking in real time. It needs Flymake mode [sourceforge.net] to be able to do syntax checking and even that's not realtime but incurs usually a few seconds delay due using external tools to compile the source.

new Netbeans 6 beta 2 has great Ruby support

[MarkWatson]

I used to do most of my Ruby and Ruby on Rails coding using TextMate but I have switched to using NetBeans. Beta 2 understands Ruby code well enough for (mostly) meaningful code completions and having popup documentation for the standard classes is useful. The integration of the "fast debugger" is also handy. Rails support is also very good. I usually use native (Matz C) Ruby, but NetBeans supports JRuby also. BTW, I used to use Common Lisp, Ruby, and Java about equally in my work, but recently I have been living with the Ruby performance hit and I am starting to use Ruby for just about everything that I do.