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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
time to read 1 min | 112 words
Well, I guess that Castle Active Record just a whole shower of flattery. This was just posted to the Castle Forums, apparently Dunn & Churchill have a product called Diamond Binding that looks very much like Castle Active Record.
There is a code project article about it here, and from the API and the license files, it looks like they have taken the Castle Active Record source and repackaged it. Now, this is allowed by the license, and this is something that I am perfectly fine at.
It looks like they did some nice things with VS integration, but that is just looking at their example, I haven't installed it.
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Why would you be alright with that? Hammett, yourself and others have put countless hours in to the project and then these two dopes repackage and sell your work. I understand that legally it may be OK, but it doesn't pass muster in any way at all ethically.
Seriously, who would want to purchase something that is free? Why not contribute back to the OSS community by directly supporting Castle development and then sell support and other IDE based tools around the Castle core instead of copying the source and renaming the namespaces? Who do they think they are Microsoft? I haven't even contributed to Castle and it pisses me off, it goes against the whole spirit of OSS in my opinion.
I can't see something like this flying in Java.
This is too funny. I clicked the link to http://forum.castleproject.org/viewtopic.php?p=9886#9886 in FireFox with scripts disabled and the page loads recursively. Looks like it is redirecting back onto itself from a bad handler.
Snael,
Do you really want to get into that argument, quite a few people.
Stuff like that happened in Java, see Gavin's post about it happening to Hibernate. There was also the issue of license violation, which is not the case here.
Two things to point out,
a/ why they choose this route is something that has to do with business decisions, not technical ones. At any rate, they are allowed to, so it is not really honest to complain about it. "You can do whatever you want with it, but we will get mad if you do" is not a nice proposition.
b/ Microsoft isn't doing it, in fact, Microsoft is taking great steps to ensure that it is not doing this. I can think of several high profile cases in Microsoft when in did the same, they are all well back in the past. (BSD code for utilities, networking stack, etc).
Again, this is explicitly allowed and it is entirely in the spirit of OSS. You are allowed to fork, that is basically the POINT of the whole thing.
In Microsoft's case they just imitate (a lot), they don't directly copy and rename namespaces. They are completely different scenarios.
I just wish they hadn't forked the castle source, even though, yes, it is allowed according to the license. I think everyone, including Dunn & Churchill would have benefited by adding value directly to the Castle project. I might even purchased said tools, but now that's completely out of the question for me. In my mind, a perfect example of adding value to an OSS product is VisualSVN.
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