At 15:58 9/10/00 -0700, Christopher Smith wrote:
>The issue isn't about paying for the JVM. The JVM is a complex piece
>of software, and as a consequence it has a lot of bugs and performance
>issues. It's also a nice piece of general purpose software which could
>be retargeted to any number of solutions with a few modifications. As
>a consequence, it's an ideal product to be released as open source.
>
>- From Sun's perspective there would also be benefits: lower development
>costs, better cross-platforms support on more platforms, better
>reputation of stability for Java in general.
>
>Really, when you think about it it makes more sense for the JVM to be
>open sourced than StarOffice.
However, after having charged their licensees (IBM, HP, SGI, and every
other vendor I know of that ships a JVM - including Microsoft) an exorbitant
amount of money to get access to the sources and legally allow them to
port the VM to their own platforms; I can only imagine the reactions the
Sun legal department would have to such an idea... they aren't pretty...
take for instance the bastardization of "open source" that is the SCSL.
From a technical standpoint I'd agree that there are benefits to slapping
an OSI compatible license on the JVM, but from a political/business pov,
I just can't see it happening. One of the arguments I've recently heard from
another company that GPL'd some code is that the savings in development were
almost offset by the additional expense in code and release management, and
from developers having to spend a lot of time explaining the design to the
community in the form of "no this patch is no good because... instead..."
(they didn't document there code very well, instead relied on external docs,
which sometimes amounted to digital pictures of whiteboard scribbles). The
portions of the Sun code I've opened remind me of this situation... the code
to comment ratio is very high (exact opposite of say, the kernel) and I
spend a *lot* of time asking myself "wtf were they thinking when they wrote
this? and why does a change for this break that over there?"
(p.s. can anyone send me a link off list to the "Cafe au Lait" article
mentioned at the top of this thread? thanks.)
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