Paolo Ciccone writes:
> I'm personally disappointed by Sun's reaction.
While I enjoy Sun bashing as much as anybody (in my case,
I have the 7+ years of working with and maintaining of Sun
equipment to justify it), let's be reasonable.
a) Sun doesn't owe us anything
b) there is limited if any gain for Sun in supporting Linux
c) they don't have unlimited resources
Java is a good tool to have. Thanks to published JLS specs,
open source efforts like Japhar and Kaffe have a reasonably
clear target for taillight chasing, and a legally acceptable
environment. Thanks to JDK source availability, ports were
possible. Thanks to the Blackdown team, we do get a stable
JDK port after a while.
If what we have is not good enough for you, then you have to
pick a different OS, or you have to support projects that
will some day remedy the current shortcomings. Kaffe, Japhar,
Classpath, Mauve, TYA, Cygnus' gcj are all tools that at
some point will hopefully make irrelevant the question
of whether Sun supports Linux or not. It is in the best
interests of the Java community to have these alternatives,
despite (or because) of not being a 100% in Sun's interests.
But like Sun, neither Blackdown nor FSF nor anybody else has
unlimited resources - it takes time.
I very much remember how impatient I got for GNU gcc to
implement C++ in full. It is still not finished - and the
language is more than a decade old. The lesson I learned
is all you can do is pay (in time or patches), or pray for
progress. The politics behind other entities' descisions is
irrelevant.
b.
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