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skreutzer · 04-15-2014, 01:39 PM

I find it highly suspicious if somebody provides a proprietary GUI front end to a freely licensed program, because all of the underlying code was written and released in order to respect the digital freedom of the user, and the GUI front end just denies the possibility to change its code, hides what it is actually doing and doesn't contribute back to the community. Further, selling the package isn't illegal, but highly dubious, since the GUI front end part was little work, and the entirely freely licensed back end was much work, the latter not even to the expense of the GUI front end developer. There's a danger that the proprietary package violates the license of the back end (well, not with epubcheck, its BSD-3-Clause license is unfortunately quite permissive to a bad extent), and the "business model" for it is solely based upon the ignorance of the user, who doesn't know that he pays money in order to loose his digital freedom.

So I might look into writing a freely licensed GUI front end for epubcheck, so that the proprietary ones don't need to be used by ordinary users any more, and the provided source code of it will enable you to fix it, if the GUI front end should ever become incompatible with newer versions of the epubcheck back end.

Recently, I've written some small starter batch and shell scripts, which do nothing else than executing the Java binaries or jar files on the command line, so that those starter scripts can be run by a double click.

run.bat

Code:

@ECHO OFF
java -jar HelloWorld.jar

run.sh

Code:

#!/bin/bash
java -jar HelloWorld.jar

I even found out that .jar files are directly runnable by a double click on at least one Microsoft Windows version. I tried to use .jar as an applet following your description, but execution failed due to problems with permissions for running Java from the browser. Still, in your example, you should look up how to embed a Java applet with the object tag, since you're missing at least the classid attribute, which should reference the name of the class file which provides the public static void main() entry point:

Code:

classid="java:HelloWorld.class"

04-15-2014, 01:39 PM	#3
skreutzer Software Developer Posts: 190 Karma: 89000 Join Date: Jan 2014 Location: Germany Device: PocketBook Touch Lux 3	I find it highly suspicious if somebody provides a proprietary GUI front end to a freely licensed program, because all of the underlying code was written and released in order to respect the digital freedom of the user, and the GUI front end just denies the possibility to change its code, hides what it is actually doing and doesn't contribute back to the community. Further, selling the package isn't illegal, but highly dubious, since the GUI front end part was little work, and the entirely freely licensed back end was much work, the latter not even to the expense of the GUI front end developer. There's a danger that the proprietary package violates the license of the back end (well, not with epubcheck, its BSD-3-Clause license is unfortunately quite permissive to a bad extent), and the "business model" for it is solely based upon the ignorance of the user, who doesn't know that he pays money in order to loose his digital freedom. So I might look into writing a freely licensed GUI front end for epubcheck, so that the proprietary ones don't need to be used by ordinary users any more, and the provided source code of it will enable you to fix it, if the GUI front end should ever become incompatible with newer versions of the epubcheck back end. Recently, I've written some small starter batch and shell scripts, which do nothing else than executing the Java binaries or jar files on the command line, so that those starter scripts can be run by a double click. run.bat Code: @ECHO OFF java -jar HelloWorld.jar run.sh Code: #!/bin/bash java -jar HelloWorld.jar I even found out that .jar files are directly runnable by a double click on at least one Microsoft Windows version. I tried to use .jar as an applet following your description, but execution failed due to problems with permissions for running Java from the browser. Still, in your example, you should look up how to embed a Java applet with the object tag, since you're missing at least the classid attribute, which should reference the name of the class file which provides the public static void main() entry point: Code: classid="java:HelloWorld.class" Last edited by skreutzer; 04-15-2014 at 01:46 PM.