Andrew Robinson said the following On 4/11/2008 11:02 AM PT:
Rhetorical question--why would a company have such a policy?
Companies don't usually make sense, you must be one of those people
that think Dilbert is fiction :)
I have worked for more than one company that enforces this policy.
They hate using open source for liability reasons, and hate you
touching the code even more.
And things would be better if they were told that any time they picked
up a patch, it might blow up their code?
What happens if the code doesn't already have exactly the hook point you
need?
Well if nothing was private or final this would never be the case
would it? Unless the code was written badly and each function was too
long.
Unless there is a hook between every line in every function. There is
no guarantee that the hooks are in the right place.
As noted above, this is by the company's choice. They could have shipped
the hacked version. The could have copied the code and then modified it.
They did neither.
As I mention, this is a real world solution and your workaround is not viable.
It is viable. It may not be convenient.
...and many companies will not permit you to change open source code and
ship the changed versions (some afraid of licenses,
There is no problem with the Apache license here, so the companies are
being silly with Regards to Trinidad
Not silly, it is actually a problem with liability. I don't agree with
it really, but trust me, there are extremely good arguments for not
modifying open source in a commercial product.
Your proposal that we make everything protected and tell the consumers to
hope for the best on upgrades does not decrease their maintenance burden.
Why is it that this keeps coming back on hope and counting on the
best? I keep saying that as a user, we *EXPECT* that it WILL break.
The idea is a *temporary* solution until an API is available.
Which we said is fine. They are free to modify the function to make it
protected and ship the code. You have come up with an artificial reason
for why they can not do this.
This has definitely ceased being a productive discussion.
-- Blake Sullivan
