Slashdot Mirror
Borland Backs Down
Danborg writes: "Borland has backed down from its horrible Kylix/JBuilder license after all the bad press they received on Slashdot and Freshmeat. You may now all resume using Kylix and/or JBuilder. Seriously though, it's good to see a company respond to the voices of the online community, and admit it made a mistake. Good job Borland."
"Industry standard boilerplate"
Also reads as "Lawyers just cut and paste and didn't actually bother working out what it was for"
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Think about it: an independent developer would HAVE to employ a lawyer to deal with licensing schemes like Borland's Enterprise license.
This is not industry standard boilerplate, but lazyness: they're avoid working with customers to figure out better licensing terms.
You, jerw134 have won eternal fame among your fellow slashdotters for this accurate prediction !
karma capped
http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif
Note that the word "its" versus "it's" is a special case.
It's = it is
Its = possessive version of "it"
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gc i211686,00.html for more info as it relates to IT, and a bit of history.
Boilerplate refers to legal language (actually any language I suppose) that is composed of stock paragraphs, phrases, etc. expressing principles that are likely to be used over and over again.
Attorneys do not generally, in other words, sit down and write a whole new contract or license everytime a new such thing is required. They build on a template consisting of the language you can take for granted and then modify only those portions specific to the subject at hand.
Incidentally, if you buy their excuse that the language was intended for the Enterprise edition and customers only, well, that's not so unreasonable. I'm sure individual piracy pales in comparison to the losses potentially incurred by such things at the enterprise level. Borland has always played fair with the small developer. Sure, like a lot of folks, I think Kylix 1.0 was bad enough that Kylix 2.0 should be a free upgrade; but as a rule, Borland supports the small developer well and if they are backing off the mistake so quickly, someone over there still has their head on straight.
Oops
If you're having problems, fix it yourself. That's what open source is about. God only knows how many 3rd party products I had to patch up myself (ReportBuilder, a spellchecker, etc).
That is true, but it is very unfair to characterize it as abandoned. Mark Duncan of Borland R&D, and the main author and maintainer of CLX has been very responsive to bug reports in the Borland Newsgroups. He may not have done much over the holidays, but Borland has done a remarkable job of keeping FreeCLX updated.
Twice I've written longer replies and Netscape's crashed on me.t e
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Anyway :
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?boilerpla
The original meaning was a large block of ready typeset text, back when typesetting involved little pieces of lead.
Real boiler plate is steel plate for making boilers (e.g. for steam turbines on ships).
See also
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?cliche
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?stereotyp
rant
Any sophisticated business person would know that boilerplate makes its way into corporate contracts (esp. end user license forms) because some moron executive (possibly the company's general counsel) decreed that there are certain terms that always have to appear in every contract. Those of us in private practice know that 8 out of 10 in-house lawyers are lazy, sloppy and often hog-tied by overbearing business people suffering from omniscience fantasies.
Your jab at "lawyers" reveals that you don't know much about how business really works.