Joshua Marinacci's Blog

NetBeans to become GPL!

I have been in the open source world for a long time. Pretty much since I first installed Slackware in my sophomore year of college (I'll leave calculating that year and my age as an exercise to the reader). I have always felt that open source and commercial interests, when managed properly, can have a wonderful balance that benefits both the consumer, developers, and companies. That's one of the reasons I came to work for Sun, in fact. At Sun I get paid to work on open source software, which was pretty much my dream since college.

Anyway, one of my big complaints with the way large companies deal with open source, including sometimes my employer Sun, is the unnecessary proliferation of licenses. The standard licenses are hard enough to understand with their annoying (but necessary) legalese. The last thing we need are more licenses that require coders to become lawyers if they want to use two products together. That's why I'm very happy to tell you that:

NetBeans will be released under the GPL v2 with Classpath Exception

It hasn't happened yet as we are still working out the final plans, but it's official and it's definitely going to happen. This is great for three reasons. First, you'll be able to get NetBeans under the GPL, just like you can get so many other great open source products. Second, GPLv2 + classpath exception is the exact same license that the JDK uses. This means more harmony with the rest of Sun's Java products. Third, this encourages the use of the GPL over other licenses which I hope will one day reduce the number of licenses out there in the world.

Okay, back to coding!

update

I linked to the FAQ in the header above, but I just wanted to make it expilict. Here's the FAQ on the change to GPL. And to further clarify, use of the GPL is optional. You can still use it under the CDDL if that works better for you.

Comments

• That is meaning what? Commercial vendors would have to publishe source code of anything they built on top of Netbeans or Netbeans RCP? No wonder Eclipse is popular...

  Posted by: euxx on August 17, 2007 at 08:02 AM

• euxx. No. The classpath exception means that using the Netbeans RCP would not require your app to be GPL. Sorry, I didn't make that clear.

  Posted by: joshy on August 17, 2007 at 08:10 AM

• Hmm. Why not just use APL then?

  Posted by: euxx on August 17, 2007 at 08:30 AM

• euxx: for the same reason Eclipse does not use it: it's not copyleft, while CDDL, GPL+classpath exception, CPL and EPL all are. Shared foundation, distributed innovation.

  Posted by: robilad on August 17, 2007 at 09:11 AM

• Will netbeans 6 be available in Ubuntu Gutsy? Along with java 6?
  That would save a lot of hassle for people and maybe encourage more use of java for development in linux.
  

  Posted by: dug on August 17, 2007 at 09:21 AM

• dug Ultimately that will be up to the Ubuntu distributors, but I don't see any reasons why it couldn't be.

  Posted by: joshy on August 17, 2007 at 09:28 AM

• sun java6 and netbeans 5.5 are in gutsy, netbeans 6 will go in after it has been released, I guess.

  Posted by: robilad on August 17, 2007 at 11:01 AM

• Fantastic, any chance of getting the netbeans docking framework into JDK7? There was that jdocking project but it seems to be stalled.

  Posted by: aberrant on August 20, 2007 at 08:02 AM

• Oh yeah, now I don't realy want Netbeans.
  Most of the times when I came across something that looks interesting but its hard to use, it uses shell scrips and is gpl-ed. Then I think, mmm, Linux kiddie stuff and just dump it and create something myself that work better.

  Posted by: carmello on August 20, 2007 at 02:00 PM

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