Out of Cheese

I received a note today from someone asking for help getting started with Facebook application development. Why’d that go to me? I’ve never even installed an extra app on my Facebook page, let alone tried to write one.

Well, it turns out that Facebook’s Java client library includes a class called BrowserLauncher, which is a simple class which can open a URL from Java code in the user’s default web browser. I wrote BrowserLauncher for my senior project in college, which needed a way to display HTML documentation. Soon after I wrote it I realized that more people could use it, so I released the code and later moved it to SourceForge. But SourceForge was a pain in the neck to deal with — their site has always been in need of some good usability work, in my opinion; testing new versions of the class on every supported platform was far more work than I’d originally thought (a good lesson to learn); and I stopped working on Java; so about five years ago I stopped maintaining the project.

Apparently some folks picked up the project and started working on it, creating a new project at SourceForge called BrowserLaunch2. They seem to have modified my license terms a bit. My license essentially said, “You can do anything you want with this. If you use it it’d be great if you could let me know, but that’s not required.” I remember getting quite a few questions from various legal departments trying to make sure they were adhering to those terms — they were very worried about whether they were OK. The BrowserLaunch2 folks have released their version under the LGPL. I think that’s lame — the point of my code was to help everyone, and the LGPL doesn’t allow that — but it’s their choice.

Facebook’s client library includes BrowserLaunch2. BrowserLaunch2 surprisingly hasn’t changed my original package name for the class, which in a fit of insanity I’d named edu.stanford.ejalbert. The complex package name means that you have to understand classpath references in .jar files to get code using the class to run, which is what the person who mailed me today was having trouble with.

I guess the short summary here is this:

• Facebook’s shipping some of my code. Neat.
• Open source code lives on for a very, very long time.