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."

differences?

[bwy]

At this point, Eclipse is a mature, stable and feature-rich IDE with a healthy plugin community to boot.

For someone who has been using it for years (I switched from IDEA a while back), it would take a lot to cause me to switch at this point. Developers end up making a pretty big investment in fine tuning an IDE for complex development environments, and there are so many little details around every corner that take time to uncover and learn.

I should qualify this by saying that I'm perfectly able to swap if a new job required it. And if I were doing HelloWorld, single project type stuff it wouldn't matter in the slightest. But once you get a dozen or so interdependent projects in your workspace and you get everything running like a well oiled machine and don't go around thinking "I really wish this piece of junk could do X, Y and Z".... well, its a tough sell.

Re:Dual license?

[4D6963]

In this case, instead of forking, couldn't you just put certain parts of your code under the GPL license, and put the parts of the code you want to let companies use and close under the BSD license?

To quote John Carmack

[boyter]

"When text editing is less then instant on a 3ghz machine you know something is very very wrong..."

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[nuzak]

Yeah I know it just sucks that Sun gives away millions of man-hours under the GPL but not every single last line of code they ever wrote. I mean who the hell do they think you are by not dedicating every resource they have to the service of free software instead of themselves?

Re:To quote John Carmack

[eviltypeguy]

If it was just text editing and not code hinting, folding, anti-aliasing, line counting, syntax checking, and a bunch of other things all at the same time -- I might agree with that. However, in this case, I think you're misusing John's quote.

wasting office hours

[tventiethfret]

I've never used a java IDE. I know nothing about software licences. I dont know why i just went through all the comments on this page. :(

Re:To quote John Carmack

[DMUTPeregrine]

I'm pretty sure I can do all that in EMACS, and that isn't slow (anymore.) So if it is slow, there is a problem.

Re:GPL v2 and v3 are identical in intent

[stinerman]

This is coming from someone who is actually an advocate of open source and has been a voice for it.

Then there is no doubt that you wouldn't get along with Stallman. Stallman doesn't do "open source"; he does "free software". Open source emphasizes the business and practical aspects of being able to see, reuse, and redistribute code. Free software is about ethics.

RMS has a nice quote relating open source and free software:

"The GNU GPL makes sense in terms of its purpose: freedom and social solidarity. Trying to understand it in terms of the goals and values of open source is like trying understand a CD drive's retractable drawer as a cupholder. You can use it for that, but that is not what it was designed for."

By accident, GPLv2 ended up being a popular license for open source projects. It was meant to be as ideologically driven, crazy, etc. as GPLv3 was. RMS didn't foresee some ways to break the spirit of GPLv2, so he revised it and made it GPLv3. Had he been aware of Tivoization or patent covenants in the early 90s, you can bet that GPLv2 would have had similar clauses as does GPLv3. Essentially, he hasn't become more ideological, he's just lacked the words by which to express his ideology until now.