Borland Backs Down

Danborg writes: "Borland has backed down from its horrible Kylix/JBuilder license after all the bad press they received on Slashdot and Freshmeat. You may now all resume using Kylix and/or JBuilder. Seriously though, it's good to see a company respond to the voices of the online community, and admit it made a mistake. Good job Borland."

Lawyers...

[MosesJones]

"Industry standard boilerplate"

Also reads as "Lawyers just cut and paste and didn't actually bother working out what it was for"

Not Good Enough

[wayn3]

Think about it: an independent developer would HAVE to employ a lawyer to deal with licensing schemes like Borland's Enterprise license.

This is not industry standard boilerplate, but lazyness: they're avoid working with customers to figure out better licensing terms.

Congratulations jerw134!!!

[snake_dad]

You, jerw134 [slashdot.org] have won eternal fame among your fellow slashdotters for this accurate prediction [slashdot.org] !

ARRRGGHHHH!!!!!!

[Jucius Maximus]

"Borland has backed down from it's..."

http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif [angryflower.com]

Note that the word "its" versus "it's" is a special case.

It's = it is

Its = possessive version of "it"

Re:industry standard boilerplate

[AdamJ]

Basically it means that within each industry, each contract for a certain type of work looks more or less the same because they're almost always based off of a 'boilerplate' - or in more geek friendly terms :) - a template contract.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gc i211686,00.html [techtarget.com] for more info as it relates to IT, and a bit of history.

Re:industry standard boilerplate

[sparkyz]

Boilerplate refers to legal language (actually any language I suppose) that is composed of stock paragraphs, phrases, etc. expressing principles that are likely to be used over and over again.
Attorneys do not generally, in other words, sit down and write a whole new contract or license everytime a new such thing is required. They build on a template consisting of the language you can take for granted and then modify only those portions specific to the subject at hand.

Incidentally, if you buy their excuse that the language was intended for the Enterprise edition and customers only, well, that's not so unreasonable. I'm sure individual piracy pales in comparison to the losses potentially incurred by such things at the enterprise level. Borland has always played fair with the small developer. Sure, like a lot of folks, I think Kylix 1.0 was bad enough that Kylix 2.0 should be a free upgrade; but as a rule, Borland supports the small developer well and if they are backing off the mistake so quickly, someone over there still has their head on straight.

Re:On Kylix and CLX

[Shadowin]

If you're having problems, fix it yourself. That's what open source is about. God only knows how many 3rd party products I had to patch up myself (ReportBuilder, a spellchecker, etc).

Re:On Kylix and CLX

[NavySpy]

There haven't been updates in weeks.

That is true, but it is very unfair to characterize it as abandoned. Mark Duncan of Borland R&D, and the main author and maintainer of CLX has been very responsive to bug reports in the Borland Newsgroups [borland.com]. He may not have done much over the holidays, but Borland has done a remarkable job of keeping FreeCLX updated.

Re:ARRRGGHHHH!!!!!!

[Hektor_Troy]

According to that cartoon you're wrong, and the poster is correct:

"Possessive
The cat's feet are out of the bag.
Also correct."

So - if you wanted to make a fool out of yourself in public, you succeeded admirably.

If you wanted to tell people not to use an apostrophe in possessive, then you posted a wrong link.

Maybe you should read the links you post next time :-)

Re:industry standard boilerplate

[armb]

Twice I've written longer replies and Netscape's crashed on me.
Anyway :
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?boilerplat e
The original meaning was a large block of ready typeset text, back when typesetting involved little pieces of lead.
Real boiler plate is steel plate for making boilers (e.g. for steam turbines on ships).

See also
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?cliche
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?stereotype

C'mon

[SPYvSPY]

Any sophisticated business person would know that boilerplate makes its way into corporate contracts (esp. end user license forms) because some moron executive (possibly the company's general counsel) decreed that there are certain terms that always have to appear in every contract. Those of us in private practice know that 8 out of 10 in-house lawyers are lazy, sloppy and often hog-tied by overbearing business people suffering from omniscience fantasies.

Your jab at "lawyers" reveals that you don't know much about how business really works.