Re: [GNUnet-developers] RE: gnunet_java_gui-1.00.tar.gz

[Krista Bennett]

Brett Wooldridge hath spoken thusly on Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 09:40:01AM -0600:
> Jan et al, this is *definitely* a "bad idea".

No et al here... no one else was advocating the idea...

> I am requesting that you stop work on reverse-engineering CMG's code and 
> focus your efforts on
> either 1) creating a Java UI from scratch, or 2) creating a good JNI 
> glue layer between GNUnet and
> Java such that writing such a client in the future will be made simpler.

If one feels he must spend his effort on Java at this point, I agree that
these are the best expenditures of effort down that path. As I said, if
the Java UI is really your main concern here (and you realize that
regardless of whether or not there is a Java UI, when the core is ported,
the gtk GUI (or some other freeware variant) will still have to be ported
to Windows for release...), there is already existing free code *developed 
by the GNUnet development team* and under GPL that could probably be 
tweaked. 

The reverse-engineering of proprietary code is... misguided at best, and
patently illegal at worst. I think that point has been sufficiently made
there, though. IMHO, no one here is in a position to "request that
[someone] stop work" on anything; the best we can do is refuse to sanction
the effort or to be involved in the distribution of the resultant output.

I don't like the idea any more than anyone else here; there are also much
more useful directions in which effort could be expended than writing a 
Java UI at this point, IMHO, but I'm not about to get into that again.

Since Brett didn't feel comfortable speaking for the development team, 
I'll be glad to. Don't take someone else's proprietary code; if you're 
going to do it on your own no one here can stop you, but we won't have 
anything to do with it and we certainly won't distribute it.

Is the horse dead enough, or shall we beat it some more?

- Krista

-- 
***********************************************************************
Krista Bennett                               address@hidden
Graduate Student
Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics
Purdue University

         If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit.         
             There's no use being a damn fool about it.
                           -- W.C. Fields