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."
I don't understand why this was presented as backing down as opposed to a mistake as to which license gets associated with which product.
There's no reason not to believe them that this was an error and had not reflected a conscious effort to change licenses on individual instances.
Companies get Legalese*. Private customers get
Greek
(* Official language of the Republic of Legalia,
a small and not-very-well-known island just off
the coast of Marketania, where, incidentally, the
majority of the population speaks Bullshit.)
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
M.
Microsoft decided that they were getting to much bad press from slashdot and now instead of stealing money, crushing companies, and controlling the government they are petting bunnies, saving orphans, and planting tree.
Also, the US gov't, in a move to improve their image on slashdot, decided to revoke all copyright law, examine patents more closely, and actually read the constitution.
No. It's the employment of lawyers with nothing better to do than to screw with a good thing.
Who remembers the Borland license of TP5 days when the software was to be treated like a book?
I think they called it their "No Nonsense License Agreement" or something like that. We didn't complain about that one as it was pretty fair. I heard it was crafted by the software engineers themselves. Why can't a license like that become the industry boilerplate?
Unfortunately, the company grew and they hired laywers who had to make it virtually unreadable to anyone without a legal background. It went downhill from there. Lawyers server a purpose in a software company, like protecting it from litigation and protection of intellectual property. But, when it comes to licensing, they need to listen to the engineers and development community and license accordingly.
A few years ago, there was a similar frackus about, I think it was the Borland C++ license. They had a "non-compete" clause there. That was promptly removed after the application of public pressure. You'd think they learn from that. Perhaps, if they're smart, they'll pass the license by their real users for review and comment before putting it in the box.
There's still a strong push on the Borland NG to have the license reverted to one like the NNLA. Let's see what happens. Borland has a tendency to react favorably to its developer community.
RD
Some people would claim that the producer has more power than the consumer in this situation, but if consumers find that conditions a particular producer's SFC too onerous then they are free to switch to a competitor's product which has more favourable terms (i.e. dump Kylix/JBuilder for something else which is exactly what I'm sure many people were planning to do).
Whether people actually pay any attention to SFC's is another matter entirely. Steven E. Rhoades writes in The Economist's View of the World that in the mid 1980's one bank inserted a sentence in the midst of its disclosure statement offering ten dollars to anyone who sent in a postcard with the words "Regulation E" on it. Out of 115,000 recipients of the statement not one responded.