Amazing GUI toolkit with visual designer & Ruby Integration

[Tom Copeland]

I think the BSD license is fundamentally more generous. If someone
wants to be completely selfish, they're free to do so. If they want to
share their fixes, they can do that as well. It's obvious why
commercial developers prefer to use BSD licensed code. They have very
few obligations when they use it. They can basically be as unscrupulous
as they want with it.

It's interesting to see how well the BSD license has worked out for the
PostgreSQL folks. I think it's a pretty good BSD success story.

Another anecdote - at one point I received some fairly extensive patches
for http://pmd.sf.net/ - which is also BSD licensed - from a fellow who
said he wouldn't have contributed them if PMD had been GPL'd.

Yours,

Tom

 

[Nicholas Van Weerdenburg]

I've read a few articles that state that LPGL has some strange legal
quirks and that it'll be fascinating to see what happens the first time
it's seriously challenged, if, unfortunately, that happens.

I hadn't heard of the reverse-engineering clause. That seems bizarre.
What does that accomplish? It seems like static-linked LPGL is a broken
license.

My other question: what is the compelling reason to statically link,
rather then dynamically link? And, are there in between modes (lazily
linked?) that make the clauses grey? I would almost imagine that the
definitions of statically linked vs. dynamically linked could eat up
months of court time .

Regards,
Nick

 

[David Ross]

I've read a few articles that state that LPGL has

some strange legal
quirks and that it'll be fascinating to see what
happens the first time
it's seriously challenged, if, unfortunately, that
happens.

A violation in a license can result to court action.
Possibly, the GNU organization would take action in
court. They have a page asking for any infrigements on
any software that has violated licensed under *GPL.

I hadn't heard of the reverse-engineering clause.
That seems bizarre.
What does that accomplish? It seems like
static-linked LPGL is a broken
license.

The reverse-engineering clause is number 6 in the link
listed below.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html
This clause has a few rules to it. Mainly I take
offense of what the main clause 6 says.

I will organize this in to sections. I have been
reading books on how to read lawyer(non-human) reable
documents.

Definitions:
a work - this means the final application, this does
not mean just a library. The program(a work) as a
whole. All that you have packaged with your release.

1> 6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may
also combine or link a "work that uses the Library"
with the Library to produce a work containing portions
of the Library,

2> and distribute that work under terms of your
choice,

3> provided that the terms permit modification of the
work for the customer's own use and reverse
engineering for debugging such modifications.

1> Now, this means that you may include or link code
from that library to your program.

2> You may license your program with the license of
your choice.

3> Now, The next meaning of the clause means that you
*have* to allow debugging, *plus* you have to allow
people to disassemble your code and modify it.

Using a normal disassembler to get assembly code is
very easy. There are also reverse compilers which can
turn code back in to the original code that is almost
like the original sources.

Assembly is very easy, but it takes knowledge and
experience. You can do anything by assembly you can do
with any language. You can also create libraries for
assembly, which make it even easier to create addition
code for programs.

My other question: what is the compelling reason to
statically link,
rather then dynamically link? And, are there in
between modes (lazily
linked?) that make the clauses grey? I would almost
imagine that the
definitions of statically linked vs. dynamically
linked could eat up
months of court time .

Good question.
Reasons?
1> A developer might only want to distribute 1 binary.

2> The developer might want to statically compile the
library with thier own libraries for thier use instead
of including many other libraries. A complete work
will take use of many libraries, possible many under
*GPL.

3> Certain statically compiled code is faster than
dynamically compiled code. It depends what code you
are linking.

4> there might be other reasons to compile statically
which I have not mentioned.

Regards,
Nick

----------------------------------------------------
(e-mail address removed)
--David Ross



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[H. Simpson]

H. Simpson, please calm down. Take a few deep breaths. Think before
posting. Don't use personal attacks. Your email was inflammatory and
rude. It was also proposing a pretty improbable scenario. If someone
spent their life savings building an application, I would hope they
wouldn't use some random comments from some internet user as a
substitute for legal advice.

Having said that, Lothar is incorrect.

Ben,

I think that the people that manage to annoy us the most are those that
remind us of our own flaws. Maybe Lothar reminded me of my flaws and
judging by your post, I probably reminded you of yours.

Your post directly states or strongly suggests that: I'm not calm, I
don't think before posting, I use personal attacks, and my post was both
inflammatory and rude.

Before anyone suggests that you are guilty of exactly what you are
accusing me of...let me state now in your defense that I don't agree
with any such accusations.

I think there's a chance that you might be a calm person, you probably
think before posting, and you might not have intended your post to be a
personal attack. I suspect you were probably just trying to be stern
with me so that I can benefit from your wisdom and not cause any
potential offense to others by making similar posts in the future.

If this is the case, isn't it amusing how our two posts written with
very similar intent received very different replies?

As to whether your post or mine were inflammatory or rude, well, it is
entirely up to the readers--not the writers--whether our posts cause any
inflammations. Hence the difference in your response to my post and my
response to your post.

Hava a great weekend.

 

[Ruby Script]

We all have our opinions but in the end, facts are all that matters.
FLTK might be ugly to you, which is fine, but some of the other things
you posted don't make any sense when compared to easily verifiable facts.

IMHO, I don't think FLTK is any uglier than other toolkits:

http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/shots.php
http://www-timc.imag.fr/Yves.Usson/personnel/FLE/calcsci1.png
http://www.osc.edu/~jbryan/VolSuite/images/screenshot.png

Hello Jamey,

JC> The good news about this whole thing is that, when it comes to
JC> developing gui apps in Ruby, we have a choice! Be it FXRuby, Ruby-FLTK,
JC> Ruby/Gtk, or wxRuby. That, to me, is the best news of all.

Okay i give you my impression (based on an older 1.1.X version)

Ruby-FLTK is good and easy to use for In-House applications.
This is where people want something that is working and they want it
as fast as possible. Most of them are (very) small applications - i
mean logic not the dataset.

If you want to deliver to clients FLTK is often no good option and it
is absolutely not good for mass market applications:

- No Tab movement and bad accelerator key handling.
Making apps hard to use for Joe Average Poweruser.

WRONG. What motivates you to write incorrect things about
FLTK--especially when it is so easy to verify as being incorrect?

Tab movement works fine. I just downloaded FLTK 1.1.5rc2 and created
dialogs where I could TAB forwards and backwards thru the widgets.

What exactly is wrong with accelerator key handling? In FLTK when you
can set the Fl_Widget::shortcut() to be something like:

mywidget.shortcut(FL_ALT+'f'); // ALT-F
mywidget.shortcut(FL_CTRL+'x'); // CTRL-X

[SNIP]

Stating your opinion is fine but if you present something as fact,
perhaps you should verify it before you post.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

Oh, those Russian elves... yes, Cyrillic was invented by Christian monks
(principally Cyril) who knew Greek.

It also has Latin and Hebrew elements. (All of them, of course, are
ultimately descended from West Semitic.)