NetBeans Click-Through Non-Free License A Screw-Up, Will Be Fixed
(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."
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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?
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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!