Andrew Finnell

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This is the way I see the GPL: You own a bakery and sell Apple pie's. Your mother gave you the recipe that everyone loves, but you keep the recipe to yourself so people will keep coming to your bakery and because you think your mother's recipe is quite awesome. One day you are walking down the street and see a sign that says FREE Apples. You think, great I could use these. However, underneath the sign it says "By using this Free apple you must give the recipe of pies that were made with this Apple to anyone that eats it."

It bothers me when the GPL group uses the word Free, whether it's in Beer or Freedom because it's neither.

	2,113 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	2 years, 4 months
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Feb 9	comment	C/C++ in applications that do not concern performance Its not performance its predictability in timing and execution. Java can perform just as well but its determinism in timing of code is poor.
Jan 3	comment	What can a company do to restrict offsite contract developers from redistributing GPLv2-licensed code modifications? If not legally, you are at least violating the spirit of GPL and FSF. The whole point is to prevent changes to code from becoming private.
Jan 3	comment	Qt (C++) vs. JavaFX: What is the relative size of each developer community? @DanNissenbaum (Rant On) Swing is horrendous. I would not wish having to use Swing to develop desktop applications on my worst enemy. It is incredibly easy to create poor applications, it is missing many controls and the third-party commercial control set for Swing is very limited. Very simple things like Drag and Drop do not work consistently cross-platform. It is a memory hog. I cringe to think that more commercial products are written using Swing than Qt. The Java community knows this and knows they had to do something about the whole mess, hence JavaFX.
Dec 31	comment	Can I use a GPL licensed piece of JavaScript on a commercial website? The fact they have a commercial license option should mean something. Theoretically you should not be able to use their GPL v2 code in your closed source system. These types of questions come up time and time again and people attempt to rationalize using GPL code in their closed source system. Buy the license.
Dec 31	comment	Can I use a GPL licensed piece of JavaScript on a commercial website? It doesn't change the fact you cannot use GPL code in a closed source system. I don't see many Apache license lawyers but we have a GPL lawyer ourselves. Yes you are correct I should of said proprietary not commercial. I see very few examples of the commercial GPL though where the "product" isn't support.
Dec 31	comment	Can I use a GPL licensed piece of JavaScript on a commercial website? @apsillers It is extremely ironic that one of his mottos is Free as in Freedom. But it is not completely Free in that regards. If it was, one could take the code, make modifications and close source it for internal use. But you cannot do that. There are restrictions. Hence, it is not Free. The Freedoms are there to protect the other people in the community and to ensure they always have access to the code. But rarely anything is purely Free such as Anarchy. This is exactly why FSS and Open Source are two different movements.
Dec 31	comment	Can I use a GPL licensed piece of JavaScript on a commercial website? The motto is free as in freedom. But you are missing an important distinction. The freedoms are to protect others. It's copy-left. You cannot use GPL products in a closed-source system. This is why products like MySQL have a commercial license and a GPL license. Even in his interviews he suggests that companies profit by creating support services around the GPL products. The products remain open and usable but can never be closed. The GPL license is viral despite what apologists say. In the end the only thing that matters if the judge during the court case.
Dec 31	comment	Can I use a GPL licensed piece of JavaScript on a commercial website? Free software foundation and GPL does not want their products used in commercial software for profit. Its in their motto. And if that is not enough, watch the movie Open Source and listen about the philosophy from the creators mouth directly.
Dec 31	comment	Can I use a GPL licensed piece of JavaScript on a commercial website? I use a simple self directed question: Will my program work without the GPL artifact. If not then I cannot use the GPL'ed product. Think of cat and grep. Cat works perfectly without grep. However, openssh cannot function with openssl.
Dec 23	comment	Using MVC in a Java app This is completely incorrect. If you are talking about performance Swing is significantly slower than JavaFX. JavaFX is a newer technology that deals directly with the graphics drivers and host OS where as Swing does all of it's drawing in Java UI thread, which is awful. If you have a brand new application JavaFX is the way to go.
Dec 14	comment	What defines a software architect? I agree with the first three bullets but not the fourth. The Architect can easily be involved with code reviews and should know exactly what the current technologies are that are being used.
Dec 11	comment	Computer vision algorithms (how is this possible?) Exactly. It's just object recognition and collision detection. Unless they hook it up to the scanner it is easily over come by moving the objects over the scanner but just slightly above it. The object will have appeared to of collided with the scanner but in fact did not.
Dec 6	comment	Correct way to sell commercial product with GPL small scripts in it "which are not combined with it such as to form a larger" You are forming a larger program. His program cannot survive without the GPL component. None of these conversations really matter because it is up to the courts to decide. I would also look at the GPL creed to have a better understanding of their stance on closed-source software. I would also be careful with the SAAS model. AGPL was written to close that loop. GLPv3 almost closed that loop but in the end did not completely close it. I imagine if there were to be a GPLv4 they will close the SAAS loop.
Dec 6	comment	Correct way to sell commercial product with GPL small scripts in it GPL does not work this way. You can't just modularize it the way you say. If your product will not work with that missing GPL piece you have to license it as GPL. In his case jQuery is an essential part of his product. Not to mention that jQuery dropped the GPL license piece, it's only MIT now.
Nov 29	comment	Code review process when using GIT as a repository? @Sid With a team of 3 I wouldn't let them all push to master.
Nov 26	comment	What should be allowed inside getters and setters? Yes I understand. I am taking the opposite approach. The problem with making member variables public is that you cannot enforce constraints.
Nov 26	comment	What should be allowed inside getters and setters? @MartinBeckett I guess that is the problem. If it is NOT valid, then there is no way to prevent that value from being set. But using getter and setters you can prevent it.
Nov 25	comment	What should be allowed inside getters and setters? Would it be valid to create a 3d point in which x,y,z are all Float.NAN?
Nov 20	comment	Deferring questions about salary expectations until the second interview workplace.stackexchange.com
Nov 20	comment	Deferring questions about salary expectations until the second interview Be truthful. State what you would feel comfortable and satisfied with. Anything else would put one party or the other in a bad situation.