>>>>> "Steven" == Steven Lembark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Steven> Actually, aside from Java they aren't. Sun, remember,
Steven> developed NFS and NIS a while back. The gave it away. They
Steven> like open source code to the extent that it helps them sell
Steven> Sun boxes and Solaris.
No, they didn't!! They *licensed* it to just about every other
vendor, since they had to have their own implementations on their own
hardware/OS platforms.
NFS and NIS are *not* open source, they are closed source. The
functional spec is a published standard, but they Sun implementation
in source code form is closed.
One of the reasons that NFS interoperability was such a headache
historically is precisely because Sun controlled the source code in
this fashion. True, everyone else licensed the source, but that did
not mean everyone shared a cammon code base, shared fixes,
enhancements, etc.
Each vendor (DEC, HP, IBM, etc) made their own midifications to the
NFS/NIS code bases, and Sun ewas NOT good about taking fixes and
changes back from their competitors, and they were even worse about
getting fixes *to* them. This latter issue I know from personal
experience. We experienced a serious bug in the NFS code on
a-platform-I'm-not-going-to-name, Sun had a fix, and it took us over a
year to get Sun to give the fix to the unnamed vendor.
(I'm not naming the vendor becuase our NDA agreements, which further
close the environment around this software, make it dubious for me to
do so)
This is what's happening to Java -- Sun licenses the code to IBM and
others, and then the vendor starts hacking on that copy of the
implementation, and you get massive branching. IBM has its *own* JVM,
different from Sun's, because the code is different.
This is a problem that people in the OSS world don't typically deal
with. We use a common code base, and we share fixes, enhancements
etc. Why? Because it is OPEN not CLOSED!!
When the perl world fractured back in the mid 90's, with the various
Win32 ports working on different master source trees, this was viewed
as a problem for the perl world, and eventually, we worked pasts the
politics and cultural problems, as we merged again. In the world of
closed source proprietary products, this is viewed as normal.
