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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."
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.
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.
"When text editing is less then instant on a 3ghz machine you know something is very very wrong..."
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!
NB's ability to use your normal build system (ant or maven) as it's project file is what sold me. Oh, and I don't have to have this directory structure anymore:
:-)
eclipse
- 3.3
- 1
- 2
- 3
Where each one is an installed copy of eclipse, and the lower numbered ones are copies that have fried themselves.
*And* a decent profiler built in
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
OTOH, maybe Eclipse is *really* focusing on the Win32 experience, and the Mac experience is just crappy?
It runs fine on both Win32 and Linux, but yes the Mac experience is crappy. Apple likes to brag about their Java support, but the OS X support for the SWT features needed to fully support Eclipse is spotty. Check out how long the infamous SWT_AWT not implemented bug took for them to resolve. That was a showstopper for a variety of Eclipse plug-ins, and it was open from 6/15/2004 to 4/20/2006. Things are better now, but there's still a subset of SWT_AWT not implemented that breaks some tools, like parts of the fairly popular MyEclipse: see SWT_AWT.new_Shell() unimplemented for that dreary mess, which well over a year old now.
While these specific bugs are unlikely to be the sources of your crashes etc., every time I read up on the state of Eclipse+Mac OS X I find myself distrusting that combination; the base platform seems unstable, and as you can see from these two the bugs that are found can sit for years before being fixed. Recent moves from Apple like pulling Java 6 from Leopard aren't comforting either.
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?