What do you guys think of working with dead/legacy or proprietary programming languages? After working on it for a number of years, it seems like your chances of getting to another position is almost impossible because you're not up to date with anything and it's almost a throw-away on your resume. Upsides: expert status: if you're ...
The LGPL license is written for code libraries in mind. I want to use a set of LGPL licensed images (icons, mostly) in a proprietary application, and I'm not really sure how the license translates to graphics rather than code. Can I use the images at all? Should I, and where should I, leave any comments as for the source of the images?...
My boss wants me to think about what to use for version control. I am a big fan of subversion, bazaar, mercurial, etc. However, we have a policy at our shop to not use open source tools! Does anyone know of any good commercia/proprietary version control tools? We are a .NET shop and I know about Visual SourceSafe. However, I have heard ...
Consider a proprietary program that produces binary files for storage (e.g. .doc). Let's say a developer wants to write an open source program that reads those binary files. Is there anything to legally forbid him to do so and to distribute that code? My initial guess is: If the user of the open source code also uses the proprietary so...
My task is to make a networking application with protocol identification, under a proprietary license. I am considering reusing the protocol matching patterns from l7-filter, but not l7-filter itself. These data files are available under a dual GPLv2/CC-ShareAlike 2.5 license. The CC license says I can't "build upon" it, but is it OK to...
I am considering writing and distributing a proprietary application that links against NHunspell (GPL, LGPL and MPL licensed) for spell checking. So far so good. However, many of the dictionary files on the Open Office web site are under the GPLv2 license. Question: Ethical considerations aside, would it be legal for me to distribute th...
For my hobby and self-employed work I write games, and as of now i've only targeted Windows. I want to break the chains that bind me to windows (and also important: .NET) but I do not know which language I should use primarily for writing 3D games , I want to use DirectX on windows and OpenGL on linux so there should at least be a way t...
Apparently, Goldman Sachs' code for program trading is written in a proprietary programming language called slang and relies on a proprietary database (secdb). I can only guess that secdb is a column-oriented time-series database for securities data (like KDB+ from Kx Systems), but I have no idea what Slang is. It could be a wrapper aro...
I am using the AWTUtilities class in my application to create custom window shapes. As far as I know, there is no other way to do it. It is a requirement. The javadoc generation gives me this error: warning: com.sun.awt.AWTUtilities is Sun proprietary API and may be removed in a future release What exactly does this mean? I can use ...