I find some of the sun-bashing both counter-productive and
slightly embarrassing.
Personally, I *want* new versions of the jdk to be released
in synch with the Windows and Solaris releases, rather than
a year later. I want Sun to support Linux rather than
think that we're all a bunch of crazed flamers.
Sun made a mistake, but they have apologized now in several places.
The "Sun will never be our friend"/"Sun is an evil corporation"
speak strikes me both as irrelevant and as a bit immature.
Despite open source, I doubt that your local supermarket will
be free anytime soon. Corporations will continue to exist.
Sun is the creator of Java, and they don't have to give it away to
anyone. They certainly don't have to port it to Linux... but they
chose to put some little bit of energy into this. The community
does appreciate Blackdown. Why resent Sun for helping us?
"We don't need Sun"/use Kaffe/etc. No, I think we do: Java wouldn't
have become a standard without Sun's backing, and Java wouldn't
be worth my mindshare if it wasn't a standard - there are other
more advanced/interesting languages out there, but most people
can't afford to re-invent the wheel in an advanced but obscure language.
Further, Sun is driving Java development, Kaffe isn't. No one
is preventing the open source community from pushing Java ahead,
or from developing a better-than-java successor, etc. Historically
though Open Source seems to do well at re-implementing well established
standards. One of my gripes with Linux is that it has a 70s mindset -
anything that is late 90s (streaming media, videoconferencing, java)
will be part of your packaged RH cd years after it appears on win/mac.
"Sun doesn't get open source." Well, Sun is a corporation, but
among corporations they seem to get it more than most. McNealy(?)
said last week that the software is becoming free, they're releasing
source to Solaris (albeit under their license), etc.
Sun has apologized, so has Inprise, let's accept their apologies
for a change?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
