Java Developer Says He Built, Launched Basic Open Source Office Suite In 30 Days 266
alphadogg writes "A freelance Java developer claims it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office suite that runs on multiple OSes. Called Joeffice, it works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux as well as in browsers, according to the developer, Anthony Goubard. It includes a very basic word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program and database software, Goubard said. The office suite was built with NetBeans and uses many popular open source Java libraries. That allowed him to built the program in 30 days, he said, a process that he documented daily on YouTube (video). The suite was released as an alpha version, which means that not everything works yet. Goubard's Amsterdam company, Japplis, launched the suite, which is available under an Apache 2.0 license. This license allows companies to change and redistribute the code internally without having to share the new code publicly, he said."
Built with Netbeans (Score:5, Funny)
That's proof he is lying. Even the developer's of netbeans don't use netbeans.
Re:Built with Netbeans (Score:5, Funny)
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Netbeans is great if what you want to do is develop applets and desktop applications in Java.
That's just not what 90% (educated guess) of Java developers are doing.
Re:Built with Netbeans (Score:4, Informative)
Not true. We use NetBeans almost exclusively (I am one of them).
Re:Built with Netbeans (Score:5, Funny)
They are termed document classes in LaTeX, not themes.
Here's my office suit, written in 3 minutes in C (Score:2, Funny)
#include
void main() {
printf("Basic office suite\n");
}
As you can see, it was possible to program this office suite so quickly because I used libraries. Note: this is an alpha release and some features aren't finished yet.
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#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main() {
printf("Basic office suite\n");
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
Thanks FSM for Free Software, otherwise I couldn't have fixed your bugs.
As you can see, it was possible to program this office suite so quickly because I used libraries. Note: this is an alpha release and some features aren't finished yet.
Can I join the developer team? Hopefully we can finish the program quicker, if we double the dev.-team.
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And as of C99 no return is necessary.
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Of course you'd know that if you hadn't learned C through internet tutorials...
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and your 'int main()' takes an unspecified amount of arguments. to specify 0 you'd do 'int main(void)'.
Nope. That's only true in a function declaration, but not in a function definition.
Re:Here's my office suit, written in 3 minutes in (Score:5, Funny)
You needed 3 minutes to write that code?
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You needed 3 minutes to write that code?
He included the time it took him to pour a cup of coffee. Everyone knows that coders cant write without caffeine.... (grin)
How does he mean it with the license? (Score:2)
Nice work,
but any Open Source license allowing "companies to change and redistribute the code internally without having to share the new code publicly, he said." Even the GPL is allowing companies to change and redistribute the code internally.
But maybe his definition of "internally" and "publicly" is different then mine?
Re:How does he mean it with the license? (Score:4, Informative)
No, its just usual to have even good developers licensing somtheing under a license without having read and understood these or other licenses.
The top misunderstanding is actually the one about the GPL mandatign you to publish the source code openly, which lies at the heart of the "Softwar as a service" problem.
To state that clearly: The only thing the GPL mandates is what you should give to the people to whom you give your software product. The GPL is designed for the freedom of the user (or customer), not the intellectual property protection of the programmer or as socialistic "software mus be open for everybody". If you distribute a product inside a company, the person you are distributing it to will have certain rights *as a part of the company*. However there is nothing wrong with a company rule which does not allow him to exercise these rights, like confidentiality agreements. Currently i am working for a company where the GPL is blacklisted due to that misunderstanding.
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The GPL is designed for the freedom of the user (or customer), not the intellectual property protection of the programmer or as socialistic "software mus be open for everybody".
How do you figure that one? The GPL grants users a limited license to the programmer's copyrighted works. That most definitely is a form of intellectual property protection. As for the socialistic part, that's a rather loaded term; still, it seems like you haven't read much from Stallman or the FSF.
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No the intellectual property (copyright) is protected by the usual copyright laws. Without these, the GPL would be be meaningless.
The GPL creates a well defined usage under which the programmer permits to use the code. It will remain under his copyright forever. There is no way that he will not be the creator of the specific parts of the code in the sense of the law (that would obviously apply to undocumented intentional backdoors placed in the code).
Regarding the "socialistic": i think the irony should ha
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Nothing New (Score:2, Funny)
EA has been putting less than 30 days of work into its titles for years. At least, that's how they feel.
He built an Alpha in 30 days (Score:2)
Claims to have built an office suite in 30 days, but it is only an alpha and not everything works. Well how much is not everything? It is just a bunch of nice splash screens?
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In other words, an unemployed Java coder spent a month working on something to get him publicity and hopefully hired....
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Yes, he did a very nice job of it. Why do coders have to be so jealous and dismissive of other people's knowledge/achievements?
I applaud the guy for taking sacrificing his time and energy on software that could have been a failure. By taking a risk, he's accomplished something impressive.
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Because the rest of us don't get mentioned on NetworkWorld.com or Slashdot for working 30 days to create incomplete alpha software to solve a problem that has been solved by multiple free (speech and/or beer) and commercial software packages that actually are complete and work well.
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Come on. That's not true at all. We complain about Lotus Notes all of the time.
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Because the rest of us don't get mentioned on NetworkWorld.com or Slashdot for working 30 days to create incomplete alpha software to solve a problem that has been solved by multiple free (speech and/or beer) and commercial software packages that actually are complete and work well.
But you'd like to get yourself mentioned on NetworkWorld.com or Slashdot? So ... you're vain and jealous?
Re:He built an Alpha in 30 days (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a project featured in PCWorld and NetworkWorld last month. While I'm not the parent, I think I understand his point and can speak from a better position.
Why all the hate? It looks like a brag on the part of the developer, intended only to impress people who don't know anything about development.
Considering the long list of bugs, missing features, and (lofty) promised utility, it's pretty obvious that this guy is a long way off from completing the project. He didn't write an office suite in 30 days, he started writing an office suite 30 days ago!
It doesn't look like Network World put the spin on the project. The arbitrary 30-day time frame was clearly a goal of the project -- not for extra challenge, but to make it appear more impressive. It's deceptive and dishonest.
As many Slashdot users know, it's not difficult to tell when a personal project is going to get some press. This looks like it was tailored specifically to get that kind of attention. That really bothers people.
So, we've got a not-that-impressive project from a less-than-respectable arrogant press-monger.
A lot of people here also think that they could do a *better* job given the same constraints. A cool project should make you go "how'd they manage that?" not "I could easily do better."
I don't know that "envy" is the right word for that so much as "injustice". After all, we've seen tons of cool personal projects on Slashdot that get little other than praise. If envy were driving the hate in this case, wouldn't we expect to see a similar reaction to other personal projects?
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Not an exactly answer, but "If all goes well, Goubard aims to release a full version of the suite next year." He's only spent ~14% of the amount of time he thinks he'll need (and that could be an underestimate, of course). That suggests that there's quite a lot that doesn't work.
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30 Days? Really? (Score:3)
If you can get to 'alpha' stage in 30 days, how many years is that to a 1.0 release?
Sounds like a stunt to me (Score:5, Insightful)
This dude is just trying to get himself attention and Slashdot is obliging. I mean for one, building an "office suite" is not necessarily impressive. All that office suite actually means is a program that does word processing, spreadsheets, maybe presentations. Well, there can be a great range in that. High end office suites, like Microsoft Office, do a whole lot of complex shit and do it well, and has a bunch of well built tools (like a spell checker and so on). However a crap office suite might do little more than you'd get out of Wordpad and SSS.
Then there's the fact that "alpha" has traditionally meant in software "feature incomplete, still under heavy development." These days given that beta often seems to mean that (it used to mean feature complete, working on bugs) alpha might mean "Well, it complies now and runs sometimes!"
It would not be very hard to set a rather low goal for what constitutes an "office suite," bash the basis of that out, and then call it an alpha. I can't try it, since I do not care to install Java on my system, but looking at the screen shots, it looks like he did precisely that. It looks exceedingly simple, largely using a bunch of the built in Java controls. That's fine and all, but I don't find that really that impressive for 30 days of work. Part of the point of managed languages like Java, C#, that kind of thing it to be able to bash together something basic pretty quick.
So ya, I'm voting that he's just publicity whoring. If he wants to call us back when 1.0 comes out, then I'll have a look. Maybe then it'll be something cool, but I kinda doubt it. Personally I'd stick to MS Office, Google Docs, Libre Office, or whatever your current preferred suite is.
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Re:Sounds like a "successful" stunt to me (Score:2)
He did make it to the front page of Slashdot, which is a pretty cool achievement unto itself. I've only made the front page for a meteor shower...
And I don't think it's "whoring", it's self promotion, and hugely successful, at least from the perspective of a developer (front page of Slashdot). Self promotion is how one gets ahead in the world, combined with development skills.
The .Net distributed caching layer I'm working on isn't as visible as an office suite, although it is more marketable in the corpo
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You created a meteor shower? Dude, that is totally impressive. Do it again!
He didn't write an office suite in 30 days (Score:5, Insightful)
He assembled components together in 30 days. He can't get from those components to a competitive product, he would need to rewrite each of those netbeans to bring the functionality up to the level of the competitors in order to actually make an Office Suite.
But as a way to show off Java as a development environment that's good.
But a Microsoft guy could do the same, dropping in a load of stock rich text edits and grid controls to product a very similar quickly.
Re:He didn't write an office suite in 30 days (Score:4, Informative)
But it wouldn't be multi-platform, which one of the selling points of the experiment. Microsoft has worked hard to make Windows-centric development easier, but only for MS platforms.
(My spailchekker tried to put "mulch-platform" instead of multi-platform, which may be more fitting for MS.)
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And NO we cannot use 'The Web' as we are in a closed and restricted Missions Operation Center.
Strictly speaking, couldn't you use closed and restricted web servers to do what you need to do? And I mean, if you're actually considering implementing something using an alpha-quality Java module that was slapped together in a few days, why wouldn't you consider installing a SharePoint server and getting the full functionality of the Office Web Apps on your local network? If all your users needed to do was read documentation, they could get 100 percent fidelity that way.
He didn't build it in 30 days. (Score:3, Insightful)
"it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office" and "The suite was released as an alpha version" mean's he's got the 80 (visible) percent done that take 20 percent of the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle [wikipedia.org]
I wish people wouldn't get headlines with this sort of claim. It helps push the entire profession towards cutting corner in order to under bid each other, which does not speak well for the quality of future software.
Speak instead of prototyping. That's much closer to the truth.
So is it good? (Score:3)
Because end users won't give a damn about how much time did it take to build, or whether it's opensource. The only thing that matters to them is whether it's better than the existing ones.
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He actually built it in one week. (Score:3)
And this is news? (Score:3)
Even the article noted it doesn't work, being alpha code.
This is too much like all those crummy half-baked Kxxxx apps that come with KDE, and they're a huge waste of download time and disk-space too.
So can we just stop wasting our time with all this and ignore it until and unless there are some in-depth reviews that come up positive *and* that give a good reason to choose whatever this is over existing software?
Dismissing comments (Score:4, Insightful)
Get your nerd on and lets see other people build something better in 30 days solo. Be nice if
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This sort of response reeks of retardation (the slow kind). Have you any idea the amount of wasted effort that would be generated if we all tried to create the crappiest office suite in the world, each our selves? I MIGHT have been behind the idea if it were to have been collaborative. There's a reason why we don't all rush out to re-invent the wheel: It's just retarding progress. Hell, Java has all the components, like a rich text editing widget + inline images, 2D Animations, spreadsheet, and more,
estimates (Score:2)
Software development times are extremely variable. It all depends on how much good quality reusable existing code and tools were found or known about beforehand.
How long it would take to write an Office Suite using no tools, environments, or libraries newer than what we had in 1984? No Linux, no Windows, no MacIntosh, just one of the many DOSes. Probably have to be C, Pascal, or some kind of BASIC, and that only if performance wasn't an issue. Otherwise, it would have to be assembler. C++ existed the
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My 80x25 textmode Pascal programs had mouse support. The feature is even a termcap... I just inverted the FG/BG color of the texel to show where it was. Built a D&D character sheet creator / dice roller that was essentially a DB + form view. Used chr: 220, 222, 223 in CP437 to make "shadows" for buttons you clicked -- They would change to a brighter color when you "hovered" and shift 1 texel horizontally when pressed. Had to write textfield and textarea routines, as well as stat tracking. You co
An open source suite for propietary formats (Score:2)
Seriously, there's no support for basic formats like plain text or openoffice formats.
However there is support for the pseudo-standard MSO formats.
If I can't open any of the files on my PC, what's the motivation to use this?
Nice, but pointless (Score:3)
First of all congratulations on the achievement. However it doesn't quite have a practical use. I mean office software in general is fairly useless, you type a document, you print it, maybe you export it to PDF, but that's just about it. It's a slightly smarter typewriter. Spreadsheet software seems interesting at first sight, until you realize that having more than a screen full of cells makes it harder than just writing a little program to solve your problem.
It has not been built yet... (Score:2)
... The suite was released as an alpha version, which means that not everything works yet....
It it is not working yet, it has not been built.
Same was done with VB controls in 1990s (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember something very similar being done with VB controls in the 1990s. I bought a package at Books-A-Million that was just a wrapper around a full-functional spreadsheet control implemented as a VBX. I wish I could remember the name of it! I can see it on a sale table with a lot of other software. Those were the good old days.
If it "uses many popular open source Java libraries" it would be easy to put them together. I know there are classes that read and write Excel files and probably others. I guess t
Lame! (Score:2)
it took him only 30 days to build... a very basic word processor
Lame. I could write an even more basic word processor in 30 minutes!
99.9% of the work was done when he said 'NetBeans' (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously? When you start with NetBeans as your base platform, you've already got a word processor built in. You've already done most of the work, for the presentation and spreadsheet apps as well, controls built in for displaying database data.
Seriously, you're building word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation apps on ... a word processing, spreadsheet capable database app. It probably does presentations too.
Guess what I can do! In 20 minutes I can make a complete IDE. I'll just start off with NetBeans RCP! https://netbeans.org/features/platform/ [netbeans.org]
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I built a video game in 48 hours. Well ok it is not a AAA title. It is a tron clone. But who cares, lets just not precise this and everybody will think that I rewrote Crysis 3.
Crysis 3 played like it was written in 48 hours.
Re:Sills will be all over this. (Score:4, Funny)
What? You say that an application developed in 30 days is not as good as one developed in 30 years? Heretic!
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This, so much this.The question is not 'can you build an Office suite in 30 days', the question is, how much functionality can you deliver in 30 days, keeping it consistent, extensible and maintainable? Surely, I can build "Photoshop" in 30 days, even make it look the same. But will it be valuable software and an improvement over previous iterations? Deploy this kind of software in a large organization and watch hell unleash. This article says more about the ego of the developer.
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I even see there is some YouTube-age [youtube.com], for which I'd never looked.
As for the 'personality' of the code, one has to like systems where one constantly calls methods like Activate() and Select() for the motivational LOC involved in keeping all of pointers tidy.
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And this is coming from someone who's done enough coding for OO to come to the realization that OO was designed by a finite amount of monkeys given finite time on typewriters that were not fully functional. That is, terribly designed, with arbitrary limitations here and there, and the constant need for workarounds. If I taught a software development class OO would be my go-to example for how to NOT design an API.
Well, if one looks at the minutiae of the legacy binary format of MS Office data files, it's easy to come to the same conclusion about MS Office.
Re:Sills will be all over this. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Quite an analogy, no pun intended. I think everyone needs to realise that some things reach a peak of maximum functionality and then can't be improved upon no matter how much you want/need to sell the next generation office suite. Business requirements are usually standardised, unchanging, and not terribly exotic. Fix bugs, speed the code up, add functions if really required, that's it.
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Quite an analogy, no pun intended. I think everyone needs to realise that some things reach a peak of maximum functionality and then can't be improved upon no matter how much you want/need to sell the next generation office suite. Business requirements are usually standardised, unchanging, and not terribly exotic. Fix bugs, speed the code up, add functions if really required, that's it.
In other words, Microsoft should have sold Office to CA, where good software goes to die a long lingering death...
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I think everyone needs to realise that some things reach a peak of maximum functionality and then can't be improved upon no matter how much you want/need to sell the next generation office suite.
You're probably right, but I'd argue that the "peak of maximum functionality" is something that would apply to the kernel of the application, which should be as small and as flexible as possible, with the rest being modules plugged around it, doing whatever TF they want with the data (remember Alan Perlis and his quip about functions and data structures). To be more concrete, I'd like to see one day an equivalent to Magritte. That sort of seems impossible to me, what with the way that office applications ar
Re:Sills will be all over this. (Score:5, Funny)
The current version is only slightly preferable to being buggered with a cactus
They call that a ribbon now.
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Time for the car analogy, not as reliable as a Porsche or as good looking as a Ferrari nor the space of a Bentley, I need to get my groceries but this must be crap.
And the first time you take it up over 50 the transmission is going to seize up.
Re:30 days? (Score:5, Funny)
That's because Facebook wasn't written in Java. ;-)
Re:Redistributing the code internally (Score:5, Informative)
I assure you that not many companies allow you to touch anything GPL even with 10-foot pole. I work for big company (150k+ employees) and there is a blank ban on touching any GPL code ever for internal development.
Internal redistribution or not, there is always a chance that you may want to give some variation of the software to client/subsidiary company/whatever - and opening source at this moment (which might be linked to some in-house prioprietary libraries in meantime) is just not worth the effort.
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Where does that stupidity stem from? I'd like to know.
The Open Source community. Apart from the enlightened few, it's long on zealots and short on knowledge
Re:GPL and Redistributing the code internally and (Score:5, Insightful)
There ain't too many zealots that follow ESR. If you were talking about RMS, he'd take umbrage at your referring to his followers as the 'Open Source' community. Liberated software, or as they prefer it, libre-software, is more like it.
To answer the GP, part of the reason is around GPL3. Linux is well understood to be GPL2, so while GPL2 was the norm, it wasn't a major showstopper. But once GPL3 came along, w/ its patent termination clauses, its 'anti-Tivoization' clauses and so on, it was rightly perceived as being hostile to business. So guess what, businesses became more hostile to it. Also, enough lawyers have come to a consensus that using GPL3 would open a can of worms as far as company practices go, and hence the ban on GPL software in offices.
Abies above hit the nail right on the head. There is always a chance that one may want to give some variation of the software to a client/subsidiary, and that's where the differences b/w copyleft licenses and others kick in. With BSD, they wouldn't need to bother about any implied obligations incurred as a result of the redistribution. With GPL, they absolutely would. The reason not too many worry about Linux is that not many, aside from say router designers would worry about tampering w/ that code. But any application software that is GPL is another story altogether.
Re:GPL and Redistributing the code internally and (Score:4, Informative)
Also, enough lawyers have come to a consensus that using GPL3 would open a can of worms as far as company practices go, and hence the ban on GPL software in offices.
This is the key element in regards to the business decision. The Lawyers are advising against it due to potential legal issues. Hell I've asked a local lawyer about GPL and Open Source and was advised not to create any internal software using it due to the potential and from the SoHo/Small business owner perspective, it's simply not worth the potential legal issues. Stick with the BSD/Apache license and you're fine.
IAMNAL and this isn't legal advice. That's to see a lawyer and pay for his advice. Don't believe everything you see online.
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So if I understand you right:
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abuse your users
The GPL crowd really needs to get off the FUD bandwagon, the fear-mongering that goes with the 'you users are paying to be abused by evil corporations' is not convincing anybody. I'm not saying it's unfounded but the fact is you need to sell the premise on positives, you can't go around telling users how they are being abused and having their rights stolen or whatever other rhetoric by using an iPhone - for example - and expect them to care when the alternative is non-existent. It really is time to start do
Re:GPL and Redistributing the code internally and (Score:5, Insightful)
It's quite simple really.
1) FSF's position on dynamic linking is retarded
2) A large corporation consists of multiple legal entities. It's not difficult to trigger "distribution".
3) If any "distribution" doesn't abide by the terms of the GPL, even when to a wholly-owned subsidiary, the organization could lose all rights under the GPL.
4) Therefore it may have to "include" source code for an entire application + vendor libraries
5) It literally won't be able to, since it may not own all of them, or some may be extremely commercially sensitive.
6) an individual developer, manager or department head can't just decide to commit a large corporation - that's why they have legal
7) Whatever a dev know about licenses won't accurately transmit to legal anyway
8) None of this stuff has been tested in court. "Making sense" or "I think" isn't enough.
Linux won't count for primarily three reasons
9) vendor distributions - if there's a problem with closed source binary drivers, practically speaking they'd have to take out Oracle, RH, SUSE first
10) the GPL specifically excludes use of e.g. common OS APIs in dynamic linking, so applications a firm distributes internally can stay closed, as long as they don't add anything GPL that is NOT part of the OS
11) There's probably nothing of real value that they add to e.g. Linux anyway. Do you want to see thousands of poxy scripts added to configure up the HTTP proxy and new hostname generation in every large enterprise?
Re:GPL and Redistributing the code internally and (Score:5, Insightful)
You are correct in all your points.
You are, however, missing one: The philosophy of the FSF.
These guys are about software freedom, not about having the largest possible market share. They literally don't care if an important part of the license is problematic for large corporations. As a metaphor, I'm sure you can easily adapt your list to the issue of slavery/emancipation. That wasn't a reason to not do it.
I'm with the FSF on that issue. Large corporations can get something worth many thousands EUR/US$ for free if and only if they are willing to accept the responsibilities that come with it. If they don't like it, they can buy or write their own software.
These are not very high barriers. Many corporations, including most of the Fortune 500, do use Free Software extensively. Quite frankly, most of the team it's just legal being conservative (I don't blame them, it's practically part of their job description to be that way) and not wanting to get into all the tricky details of what that means and how it changes the contracts with, say, the contractors that work on it.
I don't think the goal of Free Software should be to move aside and make commercial compatability be a driving force. That's one of the moves that I dislike about the Open Source rebranding. Freedom and capitalism have a tricky relationship, and they are as much enemies as they are friends. The relationship is only positive for the freedom part if you keep a careful distance - not too far away, but not too close, either.
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I don't see what the "philosophy of the FSF" has to do with it. What matters is what the license says and the extent that it's enforceable with copyright law (many parts are not, dynamic linking, AGPL in particular, sorry FSF, but "conveyance" is not a legal term with any meaning, copyright law only cares about "distribution" which is very well defined in statute).
Much of the software (and entertainment) industry wouldn't operate like they do without the current patent, copyright law that we have -- not cap
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LOL
Whereby "restrictive" means "forced to respect the rights of end users" and where "lawsuits" means "usually settle once the license is complied with."
Of course, people releasing Free Software should just expect to have their license violated while proprietary software vendors shouldn't, right?
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You don't need a license to be "forced to respect the rights of end users". If you want to respect the rights of end users, then, you know, don't include a licensing agreement. It's not as if the GPL has a legal monopoly on this paradigm. (An even better idea is not make that crap enforceable in courts, it's not). It's not that hard and you don't need a copyright license to do it.
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What? If you don't include a license then no one can do anything with it.
The GPL is the only one (off the top of my head) that prevents a middleman from stepping in and closing the sources on its way to the end user.
What exactly are you getting at?
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I'm talking about an EULA, not a copyright license. An EULA is supposed to restrict what the end-user is legally allowed to do with their own program on their own computer (but they're not making any agreement in return, it's only a promise, and should be legally unenforceable). A copyright license is legally incapable of restricting what an end-user is doing, it can only permit (re)distribution, nothing more.
You don't just "close off the sources", once you've published source code, it's like, always out th
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And this is relevant how?
Correct, but relevant how?
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Relevant because the claim "it protects the end-user" is bunk. The exclusive job of a copyright license is to permit distribution. Well, distribution isn't something that end-users do, it's something that developers do. Therefore if you're license doesn't permit distribution in some cases, you're only restricting the freedoms of developers. This is, by definition, non-free.
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Nonsense.
Yes...
A developer can be an end user. An end user may wish to have a developer make changes for them. They may even wish to redistribute it. Your definition of "end user" is excessively narrow.
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Whereby "restrictive" means "d to respect the rights of end users" and where "lawsuits" means "usually settle once the license is complied with."
Let's be clear - GPL, BSD, and Apache are based on copyright which is an artificial monopoly granted by a government. If all else fails, men with guns will come and kill those who violate your license (the same end-game of every government threat). That outcome is unlikely, but a built-in possibility with copyright-enforceed licenses.
Devs who aren't OK with that
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What point are you trying to make?
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So you're saying that if someone discovers that has used a GPL'ed library to build that neither the FSF nor any of the contributors to that library would sue to enforce the GPL rights?
I don't see how anything I wrote can be misread to say anything even remotely close to that. You're going off on a very remote tangent there, and quite a distance.
Please re-read what I wrote.
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To that extent, the GPL is working well, but the main barrier is "dynamic linking" seems not only unnecessary, but goes against most developer's notions that dynamically linking to a library doesn't form a combined single product (hence the vague twaddle about "common OS components", not least since the GNU project couldn't have got started if that had been imposed by the then UNIX vendors).
Well, they created the LGPL to cover that angle, and the developer can decide if his work should carry the GPL or the LGPL, so I don't see what all the fuss is about. If I write a library and pick the GPL as its license, than I'm making a clear statement that I don't want my lib to be part of any non-GPL distributed code.
If you don't like it, nobody forces you to use my code. :-)
its a conspiracy (Score:2)
at the Bohemian Grove the Reptilians got together and, in between sacrificing children and LSD orgies, they plot to destroy the free software movement by banning GPL from their companies.
if you have the top 50 of the fortune 500, thats probably millions of employees in the most influential organizations on earth.
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Completely true. I used to work for a very large company of > 150k employees who decreed that we wouldn't be allowed to touch certain types of Open Source software with a 10-foot pole, completely missing the fact that their entire line of copier products was based on Linux...
There was a complete disconnect between the PHB-side of the business and R,D&E.
Re:Redistributing the code internally (Score:4, Interesting)
Completely true. I used to work for a very large company of > 150k employees who decreed that we wouldn't be allowed to touch certain types of Open Source software with a 10-foot pole, completely missing the fact that their entire line of copier products was based on Linux...
There was a complete disconnect between the PHB-side of the business and R,D&E.
Not really - the code running the copier was pretty much useless without the copier; and few companies have the manufacturing ability to build copiers. Releasing the code isn't going to impact them competitively so it makes sense to use GPL'd code if it works and is cheaper than rolling your own. On the other hand, using GPL'd code in a stand alone document management system that runs on someone else's widely available hardware would not make sense; because any competitor could then resell your code without the investment in developing it and potentially undercut your pricing.
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Which is fine, really. A smarter company will out-compete them, benefiting both the market generally and GPL'ed software specifically. Those smarter companies have competent attorneys who can understand licenses, for one.
Wait, maybe one of your competitors got that meme placed into your company.
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> I assure you that not many companies allow you to touch anything GPL even with 10-foot pole. I work for big company [...]
I'm afraid your point-of-view is biased. The "never touch GPL" rule is much more likely to occur with big companies than smaller ones. Big companies are clumsy, and the decision about using GPL'ed software must likely be made by someone who is too disconnected from the differences between use/extend/link to, and the differences between use/distribute internally/distribute externally. Smaller companies are much more likely to just gather the relevant people and make a more informed decision.
Big company decision making can be cumbersome and it's often easier to say no than yes. However, they are likely not looking at the technical aspects but potential liability. They don't want to accidentally get into a situation where some proprietary product potentially becomes subject to he GPL because some coder added a few lines of GLP'd code. It's easier and less risky to simply ban the use of GPL'd code and pay to develop or license code that doesn't expose them to such a risk.
If an anecdote were in fact relevant, I'd say that I work for a small company that has absolutely no problem with using GPL'ed software, and even linking to it since we're mostly doing SAAS and not distributing code.
That is a different model
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I'm sure companies such as Boeing, Oracle and Citibank wholeheartedly agree with this point of view.
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I'm sure companies such as Boeing, Oracle and Citibank wholeheartedly agree with this point of view.
I'm not. I also work for a big multinational, and there is absolutely no problem using GPL'ed tools. There was recently a question from the legal dept. about whether we had any FOSS licensed code in our project (surprisingly we didn't), but it didn't seem as though there was a ban on things like BSD licensed stuff or whatever (GPL obviously). I don't know whether checking this made sense (some schmucks might be putting GPL'ed code in) or just the legal dept. trying to justify their existence. The company al
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Re:Now do one in a language not riddled with explo (Score:4, Informative)
If you'd actually listen to those warnings, you'd realise they're against Java browser plugin, not JRE or Java itself.
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It will also breath fire and eat your children.
That would be awesome. My one year old just spent the night screaming. I'd code a dragon to eat her if I could... Sadly this cannot be done in C.
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It's too bad you posted as AC. Your post should have more visibility because you're right. The number of posts pointing out the Pareto Principle, as if nobody here has ever heard of it, is maddening.
To follow up, what's with all the GPL bashing calling it socialistic and that companies are afraid if one guy contributes a few lines of gpl code supposedly making the whole project gpl? (hint, it doesn't, and the reverse doesn't work that way either).
What the fuck, Slashdot? It seems that if Linus Torvalds
i killed them. i killed the younglings! (Score:2)
with my open source light saber