I am all for giving credit to those how deserve it, but I have to be the devils advocate here. What about the commands in PureBasic that our direct wrappers of the WinAPI. You don't have a problem there, so I almost don't see the issue.
I understand you, but you see the Win32 API was not written by Fred, PB was and just wrapping commands for use in another language is just like selling a 'port' of PB in DLL form, which understandably is i guess intellectual property theft. Fred has put in too much time in development of these libs to allow this behavior.
@User Mike
Saying that though, any application or dll you build and develop in PB you can sell royalty free and perfectly legal as long as they are not just wrappers.
You can wrap any command you want into a dll. Period. You can wrap the entire purebasic language into a dll and use it however you want. It not until you start giving that dll away to other developers for use in their own programs that you break the EULA.
If you want to create a game in DB, Blitz, etc... and wrap EVERYTHING into PB.DLL that YOUR GAME will use... That's fine. You can do it.
You want to create that same PB.DLL and document all the function exports... And give it to the BlitzBasic community... That's a no-no.
It wouldn't kill you to write a DLL in C++. Then you could use it without any license restrictictions and whatnot. Hell, even I could translate that code into C++ for you.
I am all for giving credit to those how deserve it, but I have to be the devils advocate here. What about the commands in PureBasic that our direct wrappers of the WinAPI. You don't have a problem there, so I almost don't see the issue.
RJP,
You are missing one vital, important thing here: we have all paid for the right to use the Windows API. That cost was either included in the price of our new machine or we have paid for an upgrade. The price of that OS (much higher than PB) brought us the right to use all of the DLLs sittings in System32. Using the PB functions that wraps these DLLs is an extension of that license.
Wrapping PB's functions in a DLL would be like including those Windows DLLs with your Linux app. The person who runs Linux has not paid for the use of those DLLs and has no right using them.
User Mike wrote:Hehe, I may be in a mental institution at 20 worrying about all the legal junk these days.
Thanks everyone for your help. Fred has contacted me, and everyone of these code snippets would not be legal to distribute. I respect that, so as mentioned before I'll have to use the winapi.
Hello Mike,
I hope you still read this topic.
My question is: could you tell us the reason why it's not legal?
../tomio
I could care less about the size... Having no runtime is nice, but again, no big deal. Speed... Pure is fast, but it doesn't beat a compiled VB program in some tests. I did a sieve test that I was comparing all of the major competitors with and the winner... VB6.
The competitors...
IBasic Pro
Blitz3D
Purebasic 3.91
PowerBasic 7
Visual Basic 6
I didn't bother with Dark Basic Pro... Didn't seem worth the effort to reinstall it.
Pure does have some very good speed, but never count VB out of the picture when doing speed tests. Long time VB programmers have known for years that VB is fast... Others just haven't figured it out yet.
The .NET 1.1 runtime is close to 35MB. I did a speed test of VB against PB, with numbers, and VB won. Nobody was able to disbute that. Just do a search on me, PB, and VB, and you'll find my thread
What I hate is that even in memory, VB proggies take up more RAM then PB proggies.. so that is another benefit. So when it comes to less memory footprint (both physical and ram.. whee), pb comes out on top... that is one of the key things for me.
I am all for giving credit to those how deserve it, but I have to be the devils advocate here. What about the commands in PureBasic that our direct wrappers of the WinAPI. You don't have a problem there, so I almost don't see the issue.
RJP,
You are missing one vital, important thing here: we have all paid for the right to use the Windows API. That cost was either included in the price of our new machine or we have paid for an upgrade. The price of that OS (much higher than PB) brought us the right to use all of the DLLs sittings in System32. Using the PB functions that wraps these DLLs is an extension of that license.
Wrapping PB's functions in a DLL would be like including those Windows DLLs with your Linux app. The person who runs Linux has not paid for the use of those DLLs and has no right using them.
I see your point, but as you can see people expect to be able to do this. In other languages it is just fine to do this. (ie. Visual Basic, C++, C)
People keep telling him to go elsewhere. He know PureBasic why not use it. I am not for Fred loosing money but we all know we program to solve problems, even if you need to extend an application written in a different language.
Technically PureBASIC itself just wraps commands from given system commands.
For example OpenWindow( ) is almost identical to CreateWindow_( )
So really I think in alot of cases Fantasy Software is also treading a thin line when dealing with the Windows Platform.
In the end I suppose it is upto FS, but what makes a language popular is how easy it is to use functions rather than what functions are available.
Users are more likely to say good things about a language IF it is good to use without headaches.
This is something Dark Basic really lacks, in a big way.
That said doing this stuff using Microsoft Commands, is actually piss easy within PureBASIC as they're all exposed for direct use; As you don't have to worry about alot of stuff that you would in C/C++ it makes it far easier to use.
When you realise almost everything in C boils down to
Byte = Char, Int8
Short = Word, Int16, Short
Long = Int32, Long, Void, Pointers, Dword
Float = Float
String = LPSTR / _T
PostPosted: Fri Jun 25, 2004 17:13 Post subject:
Technically PureBASIC itself just wraps commands from given system commands.
For example OpenWindow( ) is almost identical to CreateWindow_( )
So really I think in alot of cases Fantasy Software is also treading a thin line when dealing with the Windows Platform.
Again, this is completely wrong. The code created by Purebasic will only run on systems with Windows installed. The user has payed for the privelege of using Windows.
If purebasic copied the code from those DLLs and made them available to Linux users, then it would be comparable. Do you think Microsoft would allow this?