Theron Crissey wrote:
Does anyone have any news on Sun's decision to stop supporting Java3D?
Other than a statement on j3d.org, I can't find news about the subject.
Unfortunately there is very little because Sun's marketing and
management teams feel that it is the best thing to say absolutely nothing.
What I can try to impart is some of the things we've been learning
recently in our conversations with the various people at Sun, up to and
including their CTO.
Unless you've been paying realy close attention to the graphics market,
you probably won't have noticed the consolidation that is happening.
It's come down to a 3 horse race - nVidia, ATI and 3DLabs. SGI does not
even design their own graphics hardware anymore - the new IR4 is using 4
ATI chips/boards as the core of their graphics capability. That, to
those of us that have been doing realtime 3D since the beginning of
time, is a very sad state indeed. Sun is the last of the workstation
vendors selling their own custom-designed chips, and they won't be for
much longer. They simply cannot compete with the teams of the other 3 in
the design.
What is happening internally within Sun is a lot of reorganisation of
resources. They have to keep some graphics competency, but at the same
time work out where they are going to get more bang for thier buck.
Obviously custom-designed hardware is not it. However, in order to not
be completely irrelevant in the workstation arena, they need to keep
some staff on - even just to do stuff like write drivers for their OS.
On another front, there is a directive to do "stuff" that enhances Sun's
values to customers. This, of course, goes without saying - it's
something all companies need to do. For Sun, Java is a huge boost in the
marketing stakes. If they can promote something within the Java space
that gets them market recognition, they'll do it. If switching horses to
something better is the way to go, then so be it. However, one thing
that is part of their corporate culture is to never admit to a failure
when something doesn't work out. That is exactly what you are seeing now.
The main problem is that Sun is loosing market share and they need to do
the "most efficient" thing to try to prop that up. Java3D was very much
an anomoly within Sun. It was the only Java project that was not run as
part of Javasoft. Instead it was run under their workstation/3D graphics
group. For a long time, this caused all sorts of interesting issues of a
political nature. There's some really interesting tales, but the one of
importance here is the support for OpenGL and Java. For the longest
time, there was quite fierce resistance within Sun and the 3D graphics
group, although the non-3D people were pushing for it. Why this
happened, I have no idea, but there are various theories one could throw
at it: mainly job protection and control issues.
Java3D didn't take off in the way intended. 3D graphics was being
marginallised at Sun, PC and console platforms were taking off, and many
people wanted to use Java for game programming, and couldn't. Java3D has
many serious issues, particularly for the game community. With the
decline internally of the number of people devoted to 3D, some people
saw the writing on the wall and changed posture to accept the OpenGL
work that others had been pushing for for years. There were some large
reorganisations internally, the javagaming project started up, SGI and
Sun became friends and we end up with the JSR process starting.
This has lead to some interesting structures within Sun as there are
various different tied-up management chains. One of the "interesting"
tasks we've been dealing with recently is trying to untangle those
chains to find out who, really, is in charge of Java3D. Various parties
are all claiming ownership of the codebase and being the one "in control
of its destiny". There are at least 4 different management chains that I
know of personally, that are claiming this as of today. As far as we can
determine, none of those parties actually do have control, despite
wanting to claim it. I suspect most of these are claiming it for
political reasons, but I can't be 100% sure on that.
What I do know, right now, is that we've decide to work from the top
down and see if we can straighten it out. We've had some extensive
discussions with those at the top of the Sun technology chain, brought
about by our work with some of the managers lower down in the food
chain. A lot has happened because of our work across the various open
standards and open source areas, thus we have been seen as someone that
knows the field and where the traps are. In addition, we're fairly
brutally honest with them about a subject, particularly when they ask
for "community response". They are very aware right now about how little
time they have to come up with a response to the j3d community, either
positive or negative on the release of the open source.
One of the things that is waffling in their mind right now is whether it
is worth releasing Java3d. In all the discussion we've had with them the
only issue has been whether it is useful for them to release the code
and how it would help their business. At no time have they ever
mentioned whether it would be possible. The core assumption is that they
can release all fully, it's just whether it would be beneficial to them
to do so. That's the main reason behind my request for feedback last
week. We have to put together pretty much a set of reasons why it is in
Sun's interest to release the code that can be presented up and down the
management chain. It has to be more than just an open source cheer squad
too. It has to be a valid set of community expectations that things will
continue to go forward in some form, as just dumping the code to the
world and then have no-one continue to use or develop that codebase
would not be in Sun's interest either.
Of course, this is where, we've told Sun, that they're going to have a
lot of problems. They don't want to announce anything unless they know
they have solid community support, yet the general feeling of the
community is that they're not willing to give the level of support Sun
desires without seeing the code first. A case of having been burnt too
many times by complete silence or saying one thing and doing another. In
this, I needed to express some detail of how urgent the situation to be.
To do this, I was asked to give some set of absolute requirements: meet
this, or it's not going to happen. In my most recent communications, I
had to pick a number, and what I come up with was based on a gut
feeling. There's no rational reason behind it, just what I've felt,
based on all the correspondence myself and Alan have had all over the
place with various users. In the end, the position I've put to them is
that, if Java3D is to remain relevant, the source will need to be
released within 2 months otherwise it is not worth it - almost anyone
who is really of importance from a community perspective that could take
and run with it will have moved on to something else. I also quite
explicitly stated that the _source_ has to be released by then, not just
a public promise to release. I've tried to make it abundantly clear that
in order to regain the confidence of the community actions are needed
right now, not words.
So that's the state of play right now from our perspective. There's
actually a heap more detail to fill out, but that's the "short" version.
Hope it helps to see some of what is going on behind the scenes right now.
--
Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/
Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/
Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/
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"Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now.
Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism
processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with
all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..."
- Greg Bear, Slant
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