On Thu, 5 Nov 1998 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
| > Java Linux porting team politics. The folks who have donated their
| > effort to bringing Java to Linux - all of them - have done a wonderful
| > job. Thanks to you all!
Agreed.
| > >The big problem I have is the current closed porting method is only
| > >related to Java today. This completely ignores all possibility of
| > >advancing java when backward compatibility is not and issue.
I think what I tend to (and other have shown to) think is that Sun is
doing a great job of being the pointman for the Java specification. A
simple reminder of the power of the "commodity specification" can be
found in the now-ubiquitous "HALLOWEEN" email.
What someone else has also pointed out is that Sun has not prevented
anyone from implementing their own JDK. What Sun does not do is
provide the source for their implementation. I think Sun _DOES_ want
people to provide their own tools, albeit at their own cost. I think
that Sun protecting it's source is legit, though it may be be
"OSS"-minded.
| > I'm not exactly sure what the poster has in mind, but it reminds me of
| > one of my major problems with Java. Sun has a tight lock on what
| > "Java" is, what the definition of it is. They don't seem very
| > interested in having people hack up the VM or the language, or in
| > general pushing Java in any future research directions they do not
| > directly control. I think this is horribly short-sighted of Sun, and
| > very frustrating, but that's their position (at least, as I see it.)
| >
| > Unfortunately, the JDK licensing terms reflect Sun's attempts to keep
| > Java locked up.
Without the Sun source, I believe the porting effort would be
increased tremendously. I have no problem with a small group of
developers having the only legal copies of the source; if you want to
work on the project, aren't there ways of joining the devel group @
blackdown?
| Let's be VERY clear on this point: they're keeping their
IMPLEMENTATION locked
| up. Not the specs for the language. You don't need a license to implement a
| Java virtual machine and/or the class libraries. This is pretty rare in the
| software world. Would you believe that ParcPlace claims ownership of
the CLASS
| HIERARCHY of Smalltalk, and actually threatens litigation if you don't pay
| their (minimal) licensing fee?
|
| Sun has been quite reasonable with respect to having review and
feedback cycles
| for all new APIs -- ever hear of M$ doing that? They're trying to be as open
| as they can be, in an ocean where sharks live.
I agree with this. Although Sun does want as large a piece of the pie
as possible (see MS), I tend to favor their methods more often. Public
commercial source code release was unprecedented before the past year,
with (I believe) the first significant commercial contribution by
Netscape.
Sun is right (IMHO) to keep the spec singular. This allows anyone to
play with any part it and maintain interoperability (The Right Thing)
among all the implementations.
