Hello, As a flollow up to the posting titled "Sun Tells Javalobby To Pull All Sun Java APIs Off jdocs.com" allow me to highlight some comments on Sun's latest efforts to crush the Java community and assert control.
Casey Marshall comments: Sun stepped up this week and boldly defended their copyrights, thereby ensuring that their precious programming language and the "business model" they've built around it won't be subverted by those pesky users trying to build communities. I'm not surprised by Sun's actions. They have consistently proven that Java isn't something they want anyone else to have any modicum of control over. JCP participants have no power equalling theirs; licensees of their technology have no meaningful rights to use that code; testers can't extend — or even publish the results of — conformance or quality tests. And now you can't republish their API specification, because "its business interests are not served" by doing that. Of course, there are countless things that don't serve the business interests of corporations, but exist anyway as a matter of law, because they benefit society at large. Yeah, so Sun has the High Right and Mighty Copyright over their documentation, and if moneyed interests have their way, will retain them for a few millennia. But why is that copyright useful when they distribute the material for no charge, and don't even get advertising revenue from it? * What I am surprised at is the Java programmer community — whatever community exists on places like JavaLobby — and their insistence in not dumping Sun in favor of free alternatives. I only hope that eventually stunts like this inspire deeper thought about the issue, in preference to mimicry of the party line about forking codebases. (* Of course, we're then left with the prospect that if 2005 and Java 5.0 don't work to Sun's advantage, we may well see a day when your API documentation has a liberal helping of banner ads.) Source: http://metastatic.org/text/concern/2004/08/19#bad-faith Scott Ganyo comments: Wakeup call & call to action I have always been an ardent Sun supporter of their right to do whatever they want with the Java platform. I have even argued against making Java a "standard" for various reasons I won't rehash here. But now we have a clear, unmistakable message from Sun that tells us what we already know... yet would often very much like to forget: Sun is a business, not a community or benevolent developers' organization. So, this should serve as a wake-up call for all Java developers: Sun will (and must!) do what is in it's own best interest, which is not necessarily that of the Java developers. On the other hand, let me be clear on a second point as well: Java developers are, in many ways, a community. I see at the top of my page that there are some 121,791 members of the Javalobby. This includes some of the most influential and outspoken Java developers. Sun's decision on this will stir up negative feelings, fear, and doubt about Sun's stewardship of Java within and outside of the Java development community. Add this to the existing movement of those who already don't trust Sun and are calling for an open source Java and Sun may have just stirred the pot of discontent a bit. We must believe that Sun has considered this, but perhaps those that made the decision haven't fully appreciated the negativity that will be generated by it. So, I suggest we show them. I'm calling for a petition to be created to show Sun that this is not a good decision for them. I'm calling for everyone that publishes or blogs to help generate interest in this discussion. We are a lobby, are we not? Let's lobby. Mark Wielaard comments: It will be interesting to see how jdocs.org can help in the effort to create better documentation for GNU Classpath. Everybody is of course free to use the GNU Classpath API documentation for projects like jdocs.org without asking for permission first. Just follow the free software license we use for GNU Classpath. There is unfortunately no official specification of the core libraries for the java programming language (when we started the GNU Classpath project Sun promised to work together with the ISO and later the ECMA groups to create real specifications for the libraries. As you most probably know this never happened.) This indeed makes it difficult to successfully implement and document the APIs in a way that is compatible with other implementations. So we make sure that we not only read the publicly available documentation published on the web, but more importantly that we get access to real books describing the way developers actually expect the APIs to work. O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley have published a couple of books that clearly describe what programmers using the core libraries for the java programming language can use and how these APIs are expected to work. Besides creating a implementation of the core class library and (hopefully superior) documentation we are also work on our own free software testsuite Mauve. Mauve has tens of thousands of tests for the core library. The goal is the have at least one test for every method in every class. We have not yet reached that goal, but we are making steady progresss and people helping out to make sure our implementations is as bugfree as possible. (The kaffe developers with which we work closely together have asked a couple of times for the "official" JDK TCK to run against kaffe under acceptable GPL compatible terms, but they have never gotten a strait answer from Sun about this in the last 6 months.) Source: http://www.javalobby.org/thread.jspa?threadID=13951 - Gerald -------------------- Gerald Bauer Viva! Free Java Now Campaign | http://viva.sourceforge.net The Java Republic | http://viva.sourceforge.net/republic ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
