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by Weiqi Gao.
Original Post: NetBeans Is Not Open Source!
Feed Title: Weiqi Gao's Weblog
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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.
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