(Following up on my NetBeans license story four days ago)

Tim Boudreau: In the meantime, Weiqi Gao picked up on what Elliotte had written, and repeated it, but his blog restated it as fact, saying flatly that NetBeans isn't open source. And that's the danger of this sort of thing - misinformation spreads, and nobody necessarily goes back and checks it. And we were all, myself included, not reading the whole thing. It just smelled bad, and we all said, "Yup, smells bad."

...

So, here it is in a nutshell: When you download NetBeans, you click through a license. That license says "This license covers everything except the parts that are covered by open source licenses." Which, in this case, happens to be...all of NetBeans. For a lawyer, it is perfectly clear because it says it doesn't supercede the open source stuff - how could anyone read it and not figure that out?

...

Anyway, there's a happy ending here: I don't like that legal agreement either. There's no click through license on other open source projects when I download them. Why should NetBeans have to have one? Well, we get our wish. The click through license on the download page will be deleted. Let me repeat that, loudly:

The click through license on the download page will be DELETED

For those who downloaded NetBeans, there's no need to delete it or download it again - as I hope I've made clear, your copy of NetBeans is covered under the SPL - it always was. But I'm very happy to see this confusing and unnecessary piece of legalese go.

So, thank you, Elliott and Weiqi, for helping to make that happen.

Now perhaps I'll get to spend some time coding.

This is a very encouraging first step.

Logical follow on steps would include:

• Actually DO what they say they WILL DO.
• Fix the LICENSE.html that's contained in the download bundle.
• Offer some kind of remedy for people who inadvertently accepted the wrong license when they downloaded NetBeans from NetBeans.org. A recall would do.

Until then, NetBeans remains NOT Open-Source. And that's a fact!

Responses[5]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 29, 2005 8:10:22 AM CDT #

I saw something on Slashdot that I'm interested in. It contains a link to an Interview which when followed greeted me with this:

Guess what I did?

• Spend five minutes registering?
• Tried the web default "username/password" literal pair?
• Closed the tab and moved on to the next tab?

I have come to believe that websites that want you to go through a free registeration process secretly don't want you to enter their site.

Had there not been a free registration speed bump, I might have lingered on for a few more minutes, maybe even bookmarked the page, or, better still, throw it into my del.icio.us mix.

But apparently I'm not the kind of reader they want.

Whatever!

Responses[3]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 28, 2005 7:37:02 AM CDT #

See what happened when Curt Hibbs blogged about Returning to Java After Weeks of Ruby:

Responses[3]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 27, 2005 7:38:42 AM CDT #

(Via http://wmf.editthispage.com/2005/07/25)

Elliotte Rusty Harold: I've heard Sun claim that Netbeans is open source, but that doesn't seem to be true. Among other things the license states, "You may not create, modify, or change the behavior of, or authorize your licensees to create, modify, or change the behavior of, classes, interfaces, or subpackages that are in any way identified as 'java', 'javax', 'sun' or similar convention as specified by Sun in any naming convention designation." and I "agree to defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages, costs, liabilities, settlement amounts and/or expenses (including attorneys' fees) incurred in connection with any claim, lawsuit or action by any third party that arises or results from the use or distribution of any and all Programs and/or Software." Has anyone published a version of NetBeans that is open source. or is Sun just flat out lying about this?

Before you jump up and claim "this is utter nonsense," (which was what I was about to do when I first saw the post), do yourself and everyone else a favor—go to your NetBeans installation directory and read the file named LICENSE.html.

My copy did contain passages cited in Elliotte's post. And my copy is one downloaded from netbeans.org, not the bundled version from java.sin.com.

Responses[8]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 25, 2005 10:28:17 PM CDT #

Brian Button: Is there anyone out there, parent or child, that wants to go trick-or-treating in daylight????

Wow, this Daylight Saving(s) Time thing is taking roots. Everybody is talking about it.

Responses[1]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 25, 2005 9:35:43 AM CDT #

Remember the problem I had with Fedora Core 3, SELinux and Subversion 40 daysago?

Well, I get to deal with it on my "production" server (also Julie's workstation) today, after a reboot. As a result, this weblog was off line for 45 minutes:

CFO: The machine is sluggish lately.

Me: (Lazy) I'll just reboot it. Beats firing up top and killing the stray processes one by one.

Me: (Reboot.) It's fixed now.

CFO: Thank you.

Me: (Five minutes later, saying to myself) What? An internal error on my weblog?

Is Apache running? Yes.

Is Tomcat running? Yes.

Is Pebble running? Yes.

Check the logs. Apache log looks OK. Tomcat log looks OK. Pebble log looks OK.

Check the system log:

Jul 21 17:47:55 gao-2002 kernel: audit(1121986075.661:2): avc:  denied  { connec
t } for  pid=3767 comm="httpd" scontext=user_u:system_r:httpd_t tcontext=user_u:
system_r:httpd_t tclass=tcp_socket

Me: I know it! I know it! I know it! It's, uh, uh, uh, ..., SELinux!

Me: It must be the updated policy. It won't allow Apache to connect to Tomcat anymore.

Check the mod_jk log:

[Thu Jul 21 17:47:55 2005] [error] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (1673): Error co
nnecting to tomcat. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong
port. worker=ajp13 failed errno = 13

Me: I dealt with the same problem on my workstation before.

Me: But that's before the China trip. What did I do to solve the problem?

Me: Oh wait, I blogged about it.

Me: Oh wait, my blog is hosed at the moment!

Me: (Thinking hard—long vacation tends to erase unpleasant memories) ...

Try Google: "disable selinux fedora core 3"

Wow, 34,400 results!

Me: Now I remembered. You just do this:

Responses[3]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 21, 2005 7:30:31 PM CDT #

C|NET News.com: IBM has begun participating in open-source Java project Harmony and intends to contribute code to the initiative, according to a Big Blue executive.

In the past week, IBM has dedicated an employee to working with the proposed open-source project, which is being done at the Apache Software Foundation, said Rod Smith, vice president of advanced technology at IBM.

Reactions from the industry at 11...

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 21, 2005 12:59:49 PM CDT #

Brian Zimmer: Well an alpha is finally out. It’s available here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=12867&package_i

According to SourceForge, the last release of Jython, version 2.1, was more than three and a half years ago (2001/12/31, 1295 days ago.) Hopefully Jython development and usage will pick up some steam again.

From the Release Notes:

Welcome to Jython 2.2a1
=======================

This release includes many major changes since the last full release:

 - new-style classes
 - Java Collections integration
 - PEP 302 implementation
 - iterators
 - generators
 - __future__ division
 - support for running on JDK1.5
 - new installer
 - a significant number of features to bring Jython in line with CPython
 - many, many bugfixes

It was compiled a OS X with JDK1.4 but should run on JDK 1.2 +.

The full set of changes are too numerous to list in detail.  Please consult
the sourceforge tracker for all closed issues since the last release.

Please email jython-dev@lists.sourceforge.net with questions.

thanks,

The Jython Development Team

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 18, 2005 1:24:21 PM CDT #

Mark Volkmann did his AJaX presentation again, this time at the St. Louis JUG. The presentation slides and a demo app is available here. You need to install some Ruby stuff to run the server.

This is the second time I heard this presentation. It's an excellent presentation. If you have heard of AJAX before but never had the time to examine it further, this presentation is for you. (The demo app requires Ruby and MySQL.)

My opinions about AJaX has not changed from 49 days ago, a couple of days after I first heard it.

I have come across a couple of blogs that emphasizes the An AJaX web app is more like a GUI app than a traditional web app point of view:

Harry Fuecks:

Async Requests over an Unreliable Network

Eric Meyer:

Increasing the Strength of Ajax

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 17, 2005 6:36:34 AM CDT #

Dave Thomas: I believe in test-first development in that I know it exists and therefore, I have to believe in it. I don't necessarily believe you have to follow it.

Listen to the full interview on TheServerSide.com.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 14, 2005 8:56:17 AM CDT #

I'm back for a week yet I haven't recovered from the jet-lag completely. The whole family has been getting up at 4:00am the whole week.

I'm still catching up on things. Here's a few:

• Dan Troesser's Apache MyFaces article has been posted to OCI Java News Brief (JNB).
• Mark Volkmann will take his AJAX talk to the St. Louis JUG tomorrow evening.
• JavaOne 2005 happened and I missed the whole thing. I tried to get a sense of how it went by reading various blogs, starting with this one. A bit depressing.

Installed and played with Google Earth. Very cool. Found out that it has high resolution satellite images of Beijing. Checked back with Google Maps and found the same high resolution images. Here's Forbidden City:

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 13, 2005 10:52:44 PM CDT #

Here's some pictures of our recent trip back to China:

Tiananmen Square

Forbidden City

Summer Palace

Great Wall

I took these pictures with my HP Photosmart 720 digital camera. I bought a 1GB memory card just for the trip. It's capable of holding about 900 high quality pictures. I took only 288.

I also made a QuickTime slide show out of the pictures with iPhoto on my Mac mini. I can't post it here because it is 1.1GB in size.

Responses[1]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 9, 2005 8:50:53 AM CDT #

... back. More later.

Responses[3]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on July 6, 2005 11:34:46 PM CDT #