Look, to me, "drop-in replacement" means something very specific that
even a naive academic can understand. It means I can switch "using
MongoDB" to "using TokuMX" at the top of my code, change *nothing*
else, and have everything work. I might speculate, from my ivory
tower, that this property is relevant when trying to get customers to
switch to your product.

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 10:35 AM, Scott Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> On Friday, May 1, 2015 at 12:10:32 AM UTC-4, Jeff Bezanson wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 5:26 PM, Scott Jones <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>> > Maybe because it seems that a lot of the major packages have been put
>> > into
>> > Base, so it isn't a problem, as MA Laforge pointed out, leading to Base
>> > being incredibly large,
>>
>> That's absurd. There are 500 packages. We added Dates and...what else?
>> We would like Base to be a bit smaller
>> (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/5155), but "incredibly
>> large" is a bit of an overstatement. It's *nothing* compared to
>> matlab's default namespace for example.
>
>
> 1) Anything with a GPL license... that is really nasty to anybody would like
> to use Julia on a commercial project...
>     (I have nothing against GPL, I do like OSS, but I much prefer the way
> the MIT license works, and don't have the luxury of being able to use GPL
> software in what I do for a living... [use in the sense of using a library,
> if it's not under the LGPL]... I *use* a lot of GPL'ed software, Emacs, gcc,
> ...)
>
> 2) multimedia.jl, linalg.jl, statistics.jl, sparse.jl
>    [fftw.jl, dsp.jl - I know these are also under my above GPL list, but if
> a non-GPLed alternative is found, I still think it doesn't need to be in
> "Julia-lite"]
>     quadgk.jl, profile.jl, Dates.jl
>
> pkg.jl I'm not sure about... you'd need a way of loading it, to load other
> packages, but... doesn't it use GPLed software, which could get people using
> it into legal hot water?
>
> I'm not sure about: reducedlm.jl, combinatorics.jl, don't know what they do,
> or how basic their functionality is...
>
> Also Markdown, I think there is a lot there that isn't needed just for
> getting ? help documentation (or with @doc) at the terminal...
> Anything not needed for @doc, I think should be optional, in a package.
>
>
>> > with stuff that means Julia's MIT license doesn't mean all that much,
>> > because it includes GPL code by default...
>>
>> So the license of the entire compiler, runtime, and 90%+ of the
>> standard library doesn't "mean much"? Ouch.
>> In any case Viral started adding a flag to exclude GPL libs last week.
>> The changes for that are tiny.
>
>
> Yes, and I'm very grateful to Viral, because otherwise we'd probably have
> had to totally stop planning on using Julia...
> However, I feel that the developers should be very careful to not let GPL
> get into the base distribution...
> (I think the default for 0.4 release should be without the GPL encumbered
> parts)
>
>>
>> I'm still confused about MongoDB vs. TokuMX. In your last post about
>> them you mentioned using them as drop-in replacements for each other.
>> But before that you said they are competitors, and won't necessarily
>> implement the same interface. If they have incompatible interfaces,
>> how can they be drop-in replacements? I don't get it.
>
>
> Do you remember the lawsuits about Java vs. Microsoft's version of Java?
> Or go look at the cringing README.md for the matlab compatibility package
> for Julia...
> Think about how AMD and Intel battled over extending the x86 instruction set
> from 32-bits to 64...
> Intel's approach was to introduce the Itanium chip... (real winner there!
> ;-) We called it the Titanium chip... going down like the Titanic!)
> AMD went and extended the x86 instruction set... then Intel went back and
> introduced a new instruction set that was mostly compatible with the AMD
> 64-bit instructions...
> That is life outside of academia!
>
> TokuMX recreated the MongoDB's API...  but that doesn't mean that MongoDB's
> developers are going to stop adding new things (sometimes precisely in an
> attempt to lock people into using MongoDB, make it harder to switch to some
> other platform), or that TokuMX hasn't added it's own new things.
> I had a part in playing this sort of game for years... with multiple vendors
> of an ANSI standard language, each adding their own extensions, sometimes
> having those extensions copied by other competitors...
>
> Scott

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