[geeks] Oh my god...

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 09:51:36PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> > So, sure there are other Smalltalks out there, like Cincom or Visual
> > Age, but they cost large amounts of money.  Sure, they are free for
> > personal use, but what about using for small commercial products?
> 
> Why don't _you_ actually read their licences?  They spell things out
> pretty clearly.

> > Visual Age is quite
> > expensive, so that cost would need to be defrayed over a lot of clients,
> 
> As far as I understand plain VisualAge Smalltalk is *FREE* for _anyone_
> to download.  You only have to pay for the "Enterprise" version.  That
> means _anyone_ can download their own free copy -- i.e. their own
> runtime for your application(s).  You do have to "register" to get your
> first copy, but their license is explicitly a copyright license.  You
> don't even have to agree to the early-access license for older versions.
> 
> Besides, if you're talking about small volume commercial products then
> that's exactly what you have to do:  defray the cost over the number of
> clients.
> 
> HOWEVER -- VisualAge is but one of at least three very mature and widely
> used commercial implementations of smalltalk!  Get out of your box and
> quit making assumptions that are flat out wrong.  :-)
> 
> For example ST/X (www.except.de) is now 100% free, including for
> commercial use.  I believe it's even freely redistributable, meaning you
> can hand out copies of it along with your application(s).

Are you sure that is the right URL?  The only link on the page I get is
an email address.
 
> So, take care to understand the licensing of whatever you're looking at.
> Copyright law is not the same as contract law.  If the implementation is
> offered under copyright for anonymous download then anyone can download
> their own free copy and they're free to make use of it in any way, just
> like you can use a book in any way.  I.e. if you want to give free or
> cheap applications to someone then they can download their own "free"
> copy of the runtime environment.

Your right, I've just come to associate hearing something was "free for
personal use" as meaning that I'd spend a lot of time learning something
that I couldn't afford to actually use.

I'm now looking more closely at Visua Age's web site (based on having
like Visual Age for Java years ago).


-- 
Joshua D. Boyd