You see what these f--ks did? Now I don't give a shit what reasons they had, they should have gotten over it like Netscape/Mozilla did.
Which f--ks are that? Borland? I was using a lot of Borland products at the time, so I remember the release of Interbase quite clearly. It definitely had the feel of a company wishing to keep dead code alive. Interbase was a good RDBMS, but it was losing marketshare to SQL Server. IMO, the move to open source Interbase was pushed by this, and not neccesarily out of any good will to the world.
It goes against the values I hold -- respect the company for the steps they took to open their sources and work with them for the benefit of all. If you have a problem, get some self-respect and write your own damn code from scratch.
Now you seem to be talking about the Firebird developers (where did the Netscape analogy go?) What's wrong with forking a codebase? Especially if you think that the original codebase was released by a company in trouble, as a way to wipe their hands of a dying product. Don't get me wrong, I'm dead again the zillion-opensource-products-to-do-the-one-thing sort of mentality (yet another emacs with wordstar bindings and tetris.... what's the point?), but in the case where you have taken a supposedly open sourced product, and found that the group in charge of it is being slow or tedious to get patches accepted, and in fact don't even seem to *care* any more, what's the problem with forking it? It is better to fork it than lose ongoing development entirely, surely?
As more companies open their sources, I hope that similar sentiments to mine will enter the hacker ethic.
Your sentiment being "Always write your own code from scratch, rather than take a useful codebase and work on it"? I hope not. You're missing out on one of the most powerful aspects of open source - you can take a project and modify it and release that, legally. Maybe I should point out where a fork has been beneficial: Samba and Samba-TNG (The Next Generation). Samba TNG was forked at a time where some of the developers thought the direction the main Samba team was going was wrong. TNG was aimed at rewriting parts of the core of Samba to do things much closer to the way windows does it. Now, if Luke Leighton got "some self-respect and wrote [his] own code from scratch", TNG would never have taken off. Far too much work. How is TNG beneficial? There is no hostility between the two projects. Code is moved back and forth between the two groups when they agree on a particular area. TNG even pushes a lot of its users back towards the main branch of samba, simply because their needs do not require the TNG codebase and the Samba main branch is more stable and has more documentation. There is active development on Samba, and semi-active development on TNG, and both are trying to solve the same thing in a different way. How is this a BAD thing?
To (1): This is a problem with Debian and apt. It can't be the download (I do it on my 33K) it is the hoops that /Debian/ and /apt/ require us to jump through.
If the license says you can't redistribute it, then any distribution which prefers to maintain it's own repositories will have this problem. Phil pointed out you can do it on BSD, but he seemed to imply that involves manually downloading files. I know in Gentoo you can do it, because the ebuild just grabs the files from Sun's servers for you. How does FC handle this? Sure, you can always download it manually. And you can go and set up your environment manually to path it correctly. And you can setup binfmt so that you can just run a java app without having to know it's java. What happens when you want to put a package that depends on the jvm into your repository however? It is *really* messy having a dependancy installed from source.
To (2): Yes. Let us hope that if it happens, we get a license similar in spirit to that of freedom, that Sun is given the respect it deserves and is able to profit fairly from it.
And boy if I see the Firebird faction turning their evil green eyes thataway ...
Get over it. If Borland stopped development of Interbase after releasing it, it was because Borland didn't care enough about it. Firebird did nothing wrong, other than force Mozilla to change the name of it's browser a second time in short order. Daniel