Yes it's GPL:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq....cePostedPublic

yeah he could well be breaking GPL terms and you can snag him on that too, probably is after having read more of the linked sites lol - especially if he's bundling it with a virus and failing to give the source code to those who request it. at least he gives you the family tree to aid in tracking him down.

my response was mainly to the "trying to sell our open source software".

Yeah I presented that a bit misleadingly sorry

When my brother originally GPL'd it he wasn't too hot on which open source license was best suited for him and he now considers GPL to be a mistake I think. I don't know too much about open source licenses really, but realising that people can sell it when we started seeing people selling CD's for it was something no one on his team anticipated.

there aren't a lot of open source licenses that prohibit or restrict selling because open source is about making code less restricted, not more.

Yep I get that now, but there definitely exists an arguably unethical market that sell this software at a very high price on the grounds that the customer is ignorant that it is available for free elsewhere. I've seen open source software being sold online for hundreds of pounds, all they do is send you a disc. Technically allowed but wholly unethical.

Maybe so in these days of cheap high speed internet for all, but back in the day getting a DVD's worth of decent Free software in a day or two through the post for £30 could be seen as a bargain. It may take months and cost many hundreds of pounds in phone calls to fit that through a 56k modem. The same may still be true in some parts of the world.

I mean I don't doubt some vendors are unethical, but to think it's any different from a car dealer is wrong. he is massively overcharging people day in day out for vehicles he may have picked up much cheaper at auction.

I get the feeling you think selling a debian CD for £1000 shouldn't be allowed? why not? I can buy a Win7 CD and sell it for whatever I wish, imo it makes no difference if the original source of product is free or low cost. a free market is desirable.


On the other topic, I doubt your brother should consider licensing v.1 under GPL a mistake. maybe, depends what happened. But I'd imagine in that time he got a fair few users, who provided motivation to keep developing, maybe also gave valuable feedback and ideas that made construct v.2 what it is today. Maybe giving others the right to distribute earlier versions was critical in gaining a user base, maybe not. Maybe it would have been the same if it was just a freeware / shareware, or maybe the development would have been ceased six months after the last download, once everyone moved on to some other more attractive competitor that appeared. who knows. All you do know is you have a product you consider valuable today, and it came from that heritage. So I wouldn't consider the heritage a mistake

True that's a good way of looking at it!

I'm not saying it shouldn't be allowed, just that it's a shame that the people profiting off it aren't the ones who contributed the most to the project (unless they are contributors, but I get the impression it's not).

Good point about 56k modems hadn't considered that, I would consider today though that selling open source software for an inflated profiteering price is a shame because it comes off sometimes as quite exploitative. Selling it for a reasonable cost is fine, but targeting ignorant people and exploiting that ignorance seems unethical to me.

You did punch him in the face right?

Actually this reminds me of a practice we used. Commit code change first. Check out, reformat, commit again.

Pita I know but if the developer really wanted to reformat, this process is the most considerate.

Wound up not being awkward, was just like "hey why'd you reformat half of this file" and he was like "oh my bad, just habit."

and then you socked him in the face, and he said, "why'd you punch me?" and you said "oh my bad, just habit"

amirite?

lol

So in C++, I have a string that comes into a function as "1000000.00".

Is there a windows function that will format the commas based on settings from the OS? Like the locale settings?

might help http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7...er-with-commas

So I'm looking at this JavaScript tutorial and one section uses this:

While the next section changed it to this:

And had this to say about it:

It's bolded because it's a beginner's tutorial and this is the first time they use the term. Am I crazy for thinking this is not only a bad example to introduce the concept of refactoring, but also just bad period? It looks more like pointless obfuscation to me. I also don't see how that could possibly be more efficient.

Quickly browsed over the site and loljustlol (sidenote: he'd probably be a rich man if he was any good at app development and would have ported some of his steals to apps and sold them)

I take it you work in OS game development? If so that's pretty cool would be interested in chatting about "business models" with you/your brother some day (I used to work for an open source ERP developer). Doing some veeeery slow PyGame development of some stuff I'm interested in

That is bad period (and isn't refactoring).

IMO, this would be better

as it reduces the number of times raceTimes.length is calculated.

You could also just do
right?

Never calculate something n times when 1 times is enough. I can't believe I see that example in for loops in tutorials.

So I was recently hacking around with Ruby again and stumbled upon this...
http://rhomobile.com/products/rhodes/

If that works anywhere close to the way I hope it does ... that's sicker than sick and I'm back on the Ruby bandwagon.

First example is definitely preferable to me as its immediately evident what the code is doing. Second snipped requires some conscious thought. A better example of refactoring probably would have been going from the first snippet to

is .length actually calculated every time it's accessed?

Maybe not in some languages (opcode caching or something) but it definitely is in some. Plus it's just bad practice.

This didn't occur to me, but it probably is given that the length could hypothetically change during the loop (assigning to indices outside the existing bounds extends the array)

And the "make it a function" response is amusing to me because I've actually had that same reaction to some other stuff. For instance, some of the exercises have you typing stuff like this a billion times:

When this would be a perfectly good opportunity to say, "Hey, we're typing this a lot, and that's exactly what functions are for!" The following is not actually in the tutorial, even though it probably should be:

I was willing to overlook that because I just felt like using the excuse to mess around with JS and this stuff is clearly targeted at people even less experienced than me, but if it's going to start actively teaching bad habits I think I'm done with it. FWIW this is from http://codeyear.com

I think it's a great example, it's one line less code, which means it's much more readable. Just like the C#-loop I wrote for adding up all numbers within an array where I don't use another wasteful second variable to add everything up but do everything within the loop counter itself: