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Closed-Source Runtimes

Open Source: A good entry at sourcefrog.net describing some reasons people are driven to use open source — the closed-source component library one, in particular, drives me nuts.

I’ve run into this in the past — here’s an example I can point to. That’s a fixed version of Java 1.0’s java.util.StreamTokenizer class, to fix a bug where space cannot be treated as a special character. (Hopefully it’s now obsolete, seeing as I wrote that 9 years ago!)

Note that I probably do not have permission to use and redistribute that class. Also note that the bug fix I submitted to Java 1.0 probably never made it into the code, because I was an individual user and not a major corporate client. The bug may have been fixed independently, however, given that StreamTokenizer still exists, but I doubt my fix ever got near the dev team. (However it still means I can say I fixed a bug in James Gosling’s code ;)

Invariably, getting access to source, and being allowed to fix bugs in it, is a key issue — and one that continually drives developers to open source/free software libraries. RMS has been saying this for years, of course.

Music: A massive selection of links to mp3 blogs. gabba > Pod looks very interesting… they even had a copy of Egyptian Empire’s Horn Track recently, one of my favourites.