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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."
I've tried it, but it still runs like ass. It's sad that a great platform like Java has such a bad rep because of one toolkit (Swing).
I'm developing an app in Java, using the JOGL opengl bindings and it performs fantastically. Netbeans, on the other hand, runs like I have it on a 486, not a quad core Q6600 Intel processor.
I don't know how people compare Netbeans to Eclipse, actually feels native (because it IS native) and runs snappy as hell. Not only that, but Eclipse is great for python, javascript, c/c++ and many, many other non-java technologies.
Err, nevermind, the answer's in TFA (people choose the license they want) :-/
You just got troll'd!
If it's your code you can license it however you want, for example MySQL is dual licensed under both the GPL and a Commercial license. Anyone can download the GPL version make their modifications and as long as they follow the GPL redistribute according to the GPl, or if they license the commercial version for a fee from MySQL AB they can basically release a closed source version all closed up.
If you were to dual license your code under the GPL and BSD people who wanted to redistribute modified code could follow either one they wanted, with BSD being one of the avaible choices they could close it up a lot if they so desired.
In your example, the code derived from it has to be compatible with the GPL license OR the BSD license. Once code is licensed under one or the other its usually hard to go back, but one has to make a choice up front about it.
For example I can take some code I write and release it under GPL and my own for pay license. If someone pays for a copy they and I have to abide by my paid-license, if someone downloads it then they can do things with it as allowed by the GPL. This allows me to be flexible and support the needs of buisnesses (and pay my bills) while still supporting the community.
Right, NetBeans, like GCC, never imposed any license restrictions on the code generated.
Insert self-referential sig here.
Netbeans is very stable and mature platform. There's nothing to bitch about. Eclipse on the other hand offers much more comfort concerning plain editing and refactoring tasks. Additionally it is part of a much more attractive ecosystem.
Still there is one thing where Netbeans beats every other Java IDE easily: The matisse GUI builder is really fun to work with! For Java there's nothing even close. And for that alone Netbeans has a very well founded raison d'être. If it's GPL now, lets wait and see how long it takes for Eclipse to absorb that great tool. There's already a commercial port for MyEclipse, but it's not free or usable on vanilla Eclipse, yet.
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?
You just got troll'd!
The Netbeans 6 dev/beta releases have been quickly becoming the best Ruby/Rails IDE, bar none. Used to be Eclipse/RadRails for Windows/Linux, and Textmate for Mac. Netbeans has completely blown Eclipse out of the water for Ruby development as Aptana+RadRails has stagnated. Textmate isn't really an IDE to begin with, it's quite a unique and useful text editor. But the pace and quality of Netbeans Ruby support would be very tough to match, so even many hardcore Textmate Mac users have switched to Netbeans
Along with JRuby and Glassfish Rails, Netbeans is proving that Sun is dead serious about being the best Ruby game in town. They've got competitors in all three areas, but they are quickly becoming a major force in the Ruby community
"When text editing is less then instant on a 3ghz machine you know something is very very wrong..."
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?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
As nice as Sun makes it sound, they really aren't fully committed to the GPL. They only seem to use the GPL when it suits them
A company using a license only when it makes sense to do so? How terrible!
If Sun was truly committed to free software, they would use the GPL on everything because in a true free software space it doesn't matter if your customers mix-and-match the pieces
Let's get real here, folks. Making some of your software available as open source does not mean that you should have to make *everything* you create open source. I certainly don't. Some things are open source (all of the ones on my site at the moment are GPLv2 because I loathe the moral crusade the fanatic otherwise known as RMS is trying to get the world to join in with v3); some things are commercial.
I get so sick and tired of the GPL fanboys who think that everything else is evil. The people who own the code get to decide what they want to do with it, not you. Deal with it.
If they want to give it away, be happy that you got something new to use or play with. If they want to sell it, either buy it or don't, but for the love of everything decent, stop bitching about the fact that not everything is released under your favorite license.
I've known a lot of developers that have stopped writing open source software because they got sick and tired of dealing with the fact that no matter what they released, people bitched at them because it wasn't "free enough" or because not *ALL* of their software was open source.
The whole of the world doesn't want to be Stallman followers and, to be honest, I view that as a very very good thing because the man is off his rocker.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Also, if you've been using emacs, vim is worth a look. Vim is lean, well-featured, and fast.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
You can licence your code however you want, but if you make it conditional like that you could very easily make it incompatible with the licences they're based on, or open up loop holes, or make it not hold up in court or whatever.
The way they do it for MySQL and others is when you get it, only one licence applies. You choose which one you want to apply, but the choice of the commercial licence means you have to give them money. They're just giving you the ability to sell a product and keep the source closed if you're willing to pay for it.
Victory or awesome!
Visual Basic (pre .NET) and RealBasic place restrictions on the generated code, because the distribution terms have to be compatible with the distribution terms on the runtime engine that the executables will require.
Sun's policy?
Sun is a US company and by US law, Sun is not allowed to export to restricted countries.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
The GPL is not "viral". You can use it with non-GPLed code (and it doesn't change the
license on that code) as long as that code doesn't have any restrictions which aren't
in the GPL. The "viral"ness of the GPL is that you can't redistribute it under any other
terms -- including if you make derivative works and distribute those.
The FSF also takes an expansive view toward derivative works of their own software, so
that a program linked with their code, but not otherwise including it, would create a new
work covered by the GPL. The non-GPLed component would still be non-GPL if distributed
by itself. This is why some of their software, like glibc, is under the LGPL.
At one time, Visual Studio licenses said you couldn't use them to write a competing compiler. No idea if that has been removed or not.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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. :(
I think that this argument is pointless. I've used both Eclipse and Netbeans extensively for Java and C++. Now I use Netbeans, because I think that it's more pleasant to use, and it has features which appeal to me personally. However, some people like Eclipse, and that's fine. Eclipse's high customizability (lack of structure) annoys me. Some complain that Netbeans is "slow," but it really isn't. Yes, it takes about .1 seconds for the context-sensitive code-completion to pop up, but I frankly don't know any people who code faster than their IDE. If that is the case, then the code isn't very complex and such people probably don't need any IDE at all.
Neither Netbeans nor Eclipse can reasonably be considered "lean," but neither are they the clunkers that some would have people believe. Those people probably haven't used it in 6 years. Both computers and Java have gotten faster since then.
Depends on where your main focus is, Netbeans 6 is really exciting full ruby/rails tooling within the ide, the visual webpack simply is fantastic for small webapps and the integrated jpa support also is not too shabby. I have been using MyEclipse for years, but Netbeans slowly with every release becomes more and more a strong competitor to the Eclipse area, also mainly due to the fact that if you want something decent in eclipse you have to pay, and even then you run into the myriads of bugs the WTP is. WTP has hurt Eclipse more than anything else, and if they cannot get their act together qualitywise, Eclipse one day will be dead in the JEE area. For now it still has the credits of the incremental compilation and excellent refactoring, but if you are forced to use the WTP run as fast as you can.
It depends on the toolchain, bare eclipse is best you can get for java editing second to none. (Well Intellij is also very good but that is a different league) but if you are forced to use the WTP, then Eclipse becomes a major pain. An example, a colleque of mine was using Eclipse he had to move up to Eclipse 3.3. I recommended Europa to him because he was using parts of the toolchain anyway, after Eclipse suddenly refused to given him code insight, he reverted back. Problems like this are myriad with the WTP and if I was forced to use it, I probably would have given up on Eclipse a long while ago. Fortunately there are bearable other options in the Eclipse world, if you want to shell out some money.
As said above, you can perfectly do that (within the limits of the law), if it's your code, you get to set the terms. However, such a scenario is not dual-licensing, it's creting a wholly new license (which happens to be based on two other licenses). That very different from dual-licensing where the recieving party get to choose between the licenses. It also is likely very to create a license which is incompatible with both the licenses it is based on.
I don't seem to get why anyone needs to pick one or the other.
Personally, for the last 3 years I've been using Eclipse 3.x and Netbeans 5.x. I can see the benefits of each, and each annoys me in it's own seperate ways.
For example, in Eclipse, why can't I add an external folder to the classpath without stupid variables? Why only a jar? In Netbeans there isn't a distinction.
To me though, Netbeans just feels alot clunkier. Once I have everything set up in Eclipse, I'm definitely more productive, with one caveat. The GUI builder in Netbeans is fantastic, it really is. Nothing free that the Eclipse world offers even comes close to competing with it. I usually do most code in Eclipse, make the GUI in Netbeans and import that into Eclipse.
So I say, why pick one over the other? You need more than one tool to build a house, why not use as many as you like to build your software?
I'd like to see proof of that one way or the other. There was a lot of discussion in the early days of Mono and Portable.NET about whether it would be problematic to write a C# compiler in C# because it would need the MS compiler to bootstrap. Furthermore, you'd need to distinuish between Microsoft's compiler and runtime (free as in beer) and Visual Studio (mine's a pint). Without being rude to the original post, this seems like it originated in FUD. I have no vested interest, I'm just asking.
I used to do most of my Ruby and Ruby on Rails coding using TextMate but I have switched to using NetBeans. Beta 2 understands Ruby code well enough for (mostly) meaningful code completions and having popup documentation for the standard classes is useful. The integration of the "fast debugger" is also handy. Rails support is also very good. I usually use native (Matz C) Ruby, but NetBeans supports JRuby also. BTW, I used to use Common Lisp, Ruby, and Java about equally in my work, but recently I have been living with the Ruby performance hit and I am starting to use Ruby for just about everything that I do.
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.