On Mer 30 mars 2005 3:16, Christian Einfeldt a �crit : > I must admit that as a simple end user who really loves OOo, I find > myself worried that knowledgable programmers are concerned. On the > other hand, I also see that one person commented that Apache uses > Java, or can use Java, and so I'm not sure whether the concerns are > overstated.
Some projects of the Apache Foundation (not the Apache http server) are using the java language. And this _huge_ pool of FOSS software have been totally ignored by big Linux distributions till very recently because it depended on a non-free JVM component (this represents a lot more java code than OO.o, it's not suspisciously dependent on Sun but provided by a long-time friendly org, and yet it's largely not been packaged to this day). Lately some bits that happen to build/run with gcj are going in, but only in bleeding-edge distributions that use gcc4 (and a big part of the community opposes this because Sun controls the java langage and can change its def in ways that will render gcj useless at any time). The concerns are not overstated, quite the contrary. Today the silliest python app will have less difficulty being included in a Linux distribution than any given major java app. > At any rate, I was also impressed by the strength of the comments to > the effect that open source will tend to route around obstacles. > This tends to bring us once again back to the notion of competition > helping incent people to try harder to do better. > > From a business perspective, it seems that Java is in the process of > being commoditized by Mono and gcj, and so maybe Java is at the end > of the operational cycle. Maybe now is the time for Sun to head > Eric Raymond's call to let Java go. It's not - the time is way past (last year would have been ok). Now that much of the hard work is done in gcj and classpath (because of Sun's licensing) people won't dump it like this. The right time for opening up is not when a tech has been largely replicated - it's when people can still be grateful they won't have to recode it themselves. At this point in time the badwill Sun acrued with java these past years probably outweights the gratitude it could earn for making the reimplementation of the last mile of java libraries redundant. The people that have been trying to get java running on Sun's term (ie the less prejudiced at first) are probably the ones that have been burnt deeper by Sun licensing policy. (Which does not mean that OO.o java parts will work perfectly in gcj and users won't be annoyed in a big way for probably a year at least, just that gcj is mature enough people are ready to wait for its completion instead of jumping ship. We'll probably see a red line being drawn soon between acceptable stuff that only uses the java subset that's been reimplemented and stuff that uses all the bells and whistles of Sun's java) > We are not irreplaceable. No one is. But players that take care to work alongside other members of the FOSS ecosystem instead of doing their own thing ignoring everyone else (because they provide a key service and feel they can do whatever they like) are less likely to be replaced. Remember too people have long memories - it's way easier to ruin a reputation than to build it up. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
