I was pretty upset by Elliotte Rusty Harold’s flame the other day—not upset at Elliotte, but at the legal barbed-wire someone had set up in front of NetBeans. I, among others, rattled some cages, and then today this cautionary tale showed up on Tim Boudreau’s blog. As I read it, I got madder and madder and madder, because it seemed like Tim was on the wrong side. I’ve worked with some of the lawyers at Sun and been very impressed, so I assumed that this issue was just an oversight to be corrected; but it sounded like Tim was saying “if you hold your head sideways and squint, you can see that black really is white”. I was getting ready to do a little flaming of my own, then I got to the end of Tim’s piece, and it turns out they’re going to do the right thing. So whether black is (legally) white or not, nobody else is going to have to turn their head sideways and squint.
