I wasn't involved in the Inprise deal, and I don't buy the argument that
Inprise wanted "brand recognition" on the JVM for Linux. Why don't I buy
that argument? Because Sun owns the trademark and copyright on the Java
"brand". No one else can "brand" Java. Does Inprise have their own
"brand" of C? No, they have a compiler set that perform exceptionally
well on Windows/DOS. Does Inprise have their own "brand" of Java?
Absolutely not. Java is Java is Java. That's the point of the JCK, the
specification, the required core libraries.
There might be a weak point here, namely that linux has become really
hot recently for a variety of reasons. Some of these are compelling to
java developers, including development platform stability.
Since there is a constantly increasing flow of java developers from
windows environment, and most of them expect to find an IDE for their efforts
(this can be easily inferred from past list postings), Inprise's move gives
them an incredible market boost and brand recognition in this particular
class of developers.
I tend to believe what Paolo Ciccone has posted regarding the why and
how of the Sun JDK for Linux release: Inprise had a business need and a
hard deadline (businesses tend to set unchangeable deadlines).
this is very true.
I've been seeing alot of anti-Sun sentiment since the release. Some of
it may be deserved (I was horrified that whoever wrote the release left
out acknowledgement of Blackdown -- and I was very vocal about that
internally), but most of what I've been seeing has amounted to "Sun has
no right to put out a JVM/JDK for Linux, because that belongs to
Blackdown."
Not really. As being personally vocal about the subject (with some
harsh comments about sun's behavior), this is not the point.
Sun's role in the scsl process (altough I definetely believe that the
license is really ill-formed), is two-fold:
1) assigning credit where it should be. A community is not an assimilation
of nameless workers (assimilated by the Borg :-), but a combination of
individuals that strive for a common cause.
2) Co-ordination of work. The work should be coordinated, in order
to avoid unecessary work duplication, code forking, race conditions, etc...
In this particular case, sun failed to meet its resposibilities. Not
only it totally forgot to assign credit for blackdown's work (this has
improved with the recent announcement), but it allowed an unecessary code-fork
to occur.
Someone suggested that Sun is trying to "fracture" the Linux Java
community. How does that make any sense? Do you really think Sun cares
in the least whose VM you're using? All Sun cares about is that *all*
implementations of Java conform to the spec - otherwise compatibility is
compromised and you lose the cross-platform nature of Java. That's one
of the best things about Java - it doesn't matter which vendor's VM you
run on as long as that VM implementation has been shown to be fully
compatible.
But the vendors *do* care - it is their brand on the product.
-- dimitris mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
