Louis-Davis Mitterand wrote:
>This alone defeats any argument as MS being an "evil empire". Hell, even
>MS uses Linux's success to defend themselves in their antitrust trial!
>
If one company is speaking with two tongues, it is Microsoft. To the judge
they say Linux is a threat, to their customers that it sucks and comes
nowhere close to WNT. I happened to stumble over a "technet" (FUDnet is
a better term) article last week which confirmed that using what M$
says as argumentation for *anything* is quite dumb. Basically, they tried
to say that the Sun Enterprise10000 sucks, which is lame, dumb, and totally
unfounded. You'd better try to find arguments yourself.
>It's not a troll. I mean every word. Do you call anything you don't
>agree with a "troll"?
No, but saying anything that disqualifies MS-bashing (one of my favourite
sports) on a Java Linux list is, to the letter of the definition, a troll.
>Sun's attitude where Java and Linux is concerned is much worse and
>stupider that anything MS would have done. [...]
>Sun instead is trying to find a middle ground between open-source and
>proprietary that sucks enormously and frustrates me as a Java developer.
It might be stupid, I don't know. Don't forget that we "java linux"
people don't really count at the time, and don't forget the fact that
Sun is actually attempting, to support the Java Linux effort. I think
money-wise (in terms of time donated to the port), they've sponsored
a decent amount, and more so because they've given access to some crown
jewels (the JCK) for free.
The real market, as in "Sun is going to make big money with it" for Java
will be the embedded market, I think. Before you burn a JVM in 10,000,000
consumer units, you want to have some guarantees - that it is compliant,
compatible with future stuff, that there won't be code splits, etcetera.
Completely open source stuff cannot give these guarantees at this moment,
you need a company vouching for that and I think Sun is doing very good
in playing that role, including being very open about extensions to the
language. Sure, they make mistakes; sure, I'd rather have their JVM under
the GPL, but within their operative constraints they're doing a hell of
a job of a) keeping control over Java (necessary for the mass-production
people) and b) opening access to as many people as possible.
Furthermore, no-one - Sun at the first place - ever said that the only
way to run Java is to go to Sun and wait for them to provide a JVM. At
this very moment, you have *four* options under Linux: Sun JVM, Kaffe,
IBM JVM, and Japhar. They're in a state of flux right now, but it's
not worse than the situation with G++ during the early ages of C++
(remember cfront?).
And now that the diffs for 1.2pre-v2 have been made available, all the SCSL
licensees can start debugging and submitting patches, just like in other
distributed projects (that the SCSL doesn't qualify as Open Source is another
issue - if you don't like that, don't contaminate yourself by accepting the
SCSL but rather contribute to Kaffe, Japhar and GNU Classpath).
>Have you tried Solaris recently? It sucks when you're used to Linux. No
>decent shell, no compiler, no tools, horrible and backward motif GUI,
>expensive proprietary hardware (except for Solaris x86 but go find
>supported hardware..), expensive everything.
That's very off-topic, but methinks that Solaris offers some unique features
not easily found elsewhere. Like the fact that you can develop on a cheapo
workstation and run stuff, binary compatible, on a mainframe - and everything
in between. Yes, an Enterprise/450 is more expensive than my no-name dual
Pentium box with the same performance characteristics, but I hardly doubt it
is more expensive than the corresponding Compaq server box with space for
20 drives and thee 1500W power supplies.
Don't put down Sun. It's the youngest club in the big Unix iron league,
and they've always provided a lot of stuff back to the Unix community:
RPC, NFS, and NIS to name a few things. Ok, they're a public company
so they have a bloated legal department, but basically I think they're
cool and open-minded about us freeware hackers. You can't say that of
their Redmond counterparts...
(kill -ILL Microsoft Business Practices)
--
Cees de Groot http://www.cdegroot.com <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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