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Borland Kylix Is Free - Sort Of.
StrawberryFrog writes: "Borland Kylix for x86 Linux is now free-as-in-beer for writing free-as-in-GPL'd apps. You can read all about it and download it from the Borland site."
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Once again an instituation that ALMOST gets it ... and then bans at least half of the "Open Source Community" by REQUIRING that stuff made with it be released under the GPL.
To hell with you, troll.
Why should Borland devote their time and money developing tools to allow you to produce closed-source software without paying a penny for the privilege?
And don't give me that "but I want to produce BSD-licensed software" bullshit. The BSD license gives everyone permission to do whatever they like with the code - if you want to grant this permission with regards to your own code, feel free. But who the hell are you to say that anyone can do anything with Borland's code? Don't like it? Write your own goddamn code, don't go trying to use libraries written by people who DON'T want to hand their work to Microsoft on a silver platter.
- Develop GPL'd software and pay nothing for Kylix
- Develop commercial software and pay money for Kylix
Sounds much like how QT is licensed. A good idea in my book and a great way to give back to the open source community. It's a great win-win scenario: they get customers for their commercial software and now we have another way to make great open source software.I'm sure somebody will complain that they require the GPL instead of a BSD or Apache style license, but since one may also purchase Kylix, I think developer that most needs are met.
And please, no trolling about "All software should be free and we should just pay for support." Like everything else in life, that works great for some things, but not everything. When rationality re-enters your perverse monochromatic view of the software business, gimme a call.
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Hmm this is a very interesting approach. Being optimistic, I think this can only result in:
- More Delphi developers (free as in beer is always an attraction)
- More Linux developers (Delphi is already a popular and easy to use language, but is not free for Windows)
- A set of libraries maintained by said developers
- More GPL'ed code.
A win for both Borland, OSS and for Linux. You might argue that this exludes other "free" licenses, but IMHO the GPL is the only way this could have been done. Eat that M$Borland sells Kylix to make money. Perhaps that's a new idea to some of you, but companies still do that. Out of the goodness of their corporate heart, they decided to make an Open Edition of Kylix for all of us GNU freaks (myself included). By doing this, we can hope to see a whole bunch more neat stuff developed under the GNU. I've been using Delphi for years now producing applications for a vertical market, and I believe it to be superior than C++, but please feel free to try it and form your own opinion.
I personally believe that Kylix may do more for GNU than anything has in the past. Look for BIG things to happen in Linux/GNU over the next couple years.
Au contraire, they ABSOLUTELY get it.
They're using the strong point of the GPL --- no closed-source variants can exist --- to force people to BUY their product if they want to sell their binaries. This is a brilliant strategy and is impossible using any other license. If they did a BSD-style license noone would care to buy their commercial development kit, and if they disallowed you from distributing at all (demo lincence) it wouldn't get much exposure as noone except the developer can run it.
As they have it now, people can produce great apps using Kylix under the GPL (free advertising), once people want to sell their stuff they have to go to Borland and give them cash.