To open source or not too open source

Posted on January 21, 2005  •  1 minutes  • 155 words

Quite often I encounter a (java) project and while using it I download the source to see how it does things. When looking into the source I often see usage of things like jakarta-oro, xerces, xalan, jdom, dom4j to name a few. As the current jdk1.5 contains an xml parser/xsl transformer/regex I often see myself getting rid of these dependencies as the native JDK ones are much faster.

Only problem is, when I talk to the people developing it, they either don’t answer at all (ok an old project) or they don’t like the license of it (GPL or LGPL). The latter I can understand (well kinda) but the first put’s me in some kind of dilemma as it would be so much nicer to put an updated version back online to allow other people to use it.

But since I’m not a lawyer and don’t intend of becoming one, I’m kind of reluctant too.