Mike,
instead of quoting and replying I'll just address you main point, as asked
by you, about the "division" in development.
Things are really simple and Karl actually confirmed in this forum part of
this story. At Inprise we used the Blackdown JDK from march 5th, the day
Pre1 was released the first day I demoed to our group JBuilder on Linux. I
demoed, and credited Blackdown for the JDK, JBuilder at our 10th developer
conference in Philadelphia. The attendees were about 3000. If anybody wants
to see the point where I talked about the "incredible work of the Blackdown
team" I have the tapes. After several months we were ready to test JBuilder
on Linux but we still didn't have a final JDK. We thought a lot about this
and then decided we could allocate some time and people and help Blackdown
to finish JDK 1.2.2 + JPDA. We contacted Blackdown through the only contact
posted on the Website: Karl. Karl gave us the contact information of Steve.
We contacted Steve and offered our help, he said that he was interested but
then we didn't receive any other news. We tried to contact him several times
but we never got a reply. We still have the emails we sent. I don't want to
get into a confrontation, these are just the facts.
After not receiving any news and seeing that other inquiries on this mailing
list were ignored, other people asked about 1.2.2 and/or JPDA, we contacted
Sun. A decision was made to give it a try, nothing official, we were not
sure we could adress all the issues in time and being able to produce
something that was able to pass JCK. This last point was an absolute
requirement: without JCK we would not have released the product. After some
weeks of testing we got to a point we were feeling comfortable we could do
it. The rest is history.
We have no plan for "branding" the JDK. We've been major contributors to the
JDK for years and didn't make a big deal of it. JavaBeans and the JDK 1.1
event models were both designed in Borland during development of JBuilder
and then adopted by Sun. I believe that contribution is even bigger than the
Linux port. What about that for "credit not given" :) ? We are in the
businnes of development tools, the JDK is not our interest, we depend on it
and so we decided to fix the source of our problem. A short tem solution
while waiting for the long term fix. As I said before, if somebody else will
produce a better, faster JDK we will be very happy.
On Sat, Dec 11, 1999 at 12:45:26AM -0500, Mike Ajemian wrote:
> Don't believe I mentioned the word conspiracy or even tried to
> represent any argument as such. Amazed at how the responses have
> represented the "crackpot" perspective so quickly. I don't believe
> Sun and Inprise conspired to block blackdown out. I think Inprise
> wants it's own presence for its own jdk. Period. They made a
> business decision to "roll their own" rather than pursue a
> collaborative relationship with the individuals who had written the
> code that Inprise was basing their jdk upon. Not Inprise-blackdown,
> but Inprise. Simply that Inprise doesn't want to dilute their brand,
> especially with the market, which might view an association with
> blackdown as a liability (being composed of, as you stated in an
> earlier posting, "volunteers".)
>
> To strengthen this argument, look at the perception of the public to a
> little company named RedHat. They went from giving away software, to
> charging for free software. The public went from skeptical when the
> software was free, to supportive/enthusiastic/euphoric when the
> software cost money and they offered a plan to support the software.
> Blackdown gives away software and is viewed as a collective of
> hobbyists. That's bad from the financial and business perspective
> where the question invariably is raised as to "who will support the
> software when we need a fix and the person that wrote the code is one
> of the hobbyists". I don't think Inprise wanted to ever have to field
> that question. I could be wrong, but if I am, I'd like to know why.
>
> My opinions are based on years of working in the industry and being
> involved in discussions involving brand representation and issues of
> brand dilution. To me, Inprise had no incentive to involve blackdown
> in their release, so they didn't involve blackdown. If my opinions
> are wrong, I'm more than happy to admit it and learn from my
> mistake(s). Just somebody point out the facts so I can understand.
> But calling my arguments or the arguments of others "conspiracy
> theory" does nothing to further discussion on the matters at hand.
>
> > The thing that is funny for me is that you, and other people on this
> > list, refer to who works in Inprise or other companies like we are not
> > part of the Linux community.
>
> Never said you weren't part of the linux community. My raising issue
> with you means that you're a peer in this community. If I felt
> otherwise I would let you know directly.
>
> Would appreciate it if you would consider addressing my main point,
> which is that fracturing the development efforts is divisive and in
> the long run potentially more harmful to the future of java on Linux.
> You have an opinion on that, I'd like to hear it. To me, the prospect
> of collaboration was worth more than a couple of phone calls.
>
> cheers,
> Mike
>
>
--
Paolo Ciccone
JBuilder dev.team
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