Miklos Wagner wrote:
I'm not an expert on this field. Neither I do know what features Sun's
VRML loader supports, but I think there should be some other ways
to discuss things than calling each other as a liar. I also think this forum
shouldn't be about personal dislikes.
I wouldn't worry too much about what Flavin says - he's the local
nutcase. He's hanging himself with these messages. I was chatting with
the NIST folks at Siggraph and he's been actually ringning them up and
personally harrasing them on the phone. I don't know if it has started
yet, but the legal team there are already preparing harasment and libel
lawsuits against the guy - best to just ignore his rantings.
of this list, you would be out by now... maybe Justin makes assumptions and/or
misunderstand
things but since I'm also working for a big company I rather do not believe all what
Sun says...
That is entirely possible. I write the things how I see them from the
work that I've been doing with various people within Sun. These are my
experiences and thus are going to be naturally biased. Now when _other_
managers inside Sun are telling me, face to face, that such and such
happened, then I hear that from two or three different people working in
the same company, I tend to take that as as close to truth as I can get.
I try to point out the things that I think are opinions versus those
that are pretty solid that I've gotten from multiple sources. AFAIK, our
company (that being Alan and myself) are the only people outside of Sun
actually attempting to make any progress here. Since Sun have gone into
their usual "saying nothing is better than saying something" approach to
a situation, I'm at least attempting to fill the void with some
information about what we've been doing and hearing.
Should you take what I say all at face value? Probably not; keep a
reasonable amount of salt handy with you, but I certainly try to present
as much useful information as I currently know. For example, Doug saying
that they are continuing to support Java3D directly contradicts what I
have been told by at least 4 different high-ranking managers inside Sun
- one of those happening to be Greg Popodopoulus, their CTO. Those sort
of statements to me, are pretty concrete. Yet things like other
statements from managers like we'll open source all of Java3D and give
it to you by next Wednesday are not concrete at all. In all honesty,
everyone that we talk to within Sun has a different idea about what to
do. Not everyone is in favour of going OS with Java3D - and there are
different reasons why too: business stuff (it will help Microsoft),
political (I hate manager X , so I'm going kill anything he does) or
philosophical (I don't believe OS is the way to do anything, it'll ruin
it). There are others on the other side of the fence within Sun too -
religously believing it should be OSS no matter what - they have just as
little justification for their perspective as the anti-OSS people and
frankly, even I disagree with some of their "arguments" for it. The work
we are doing right now is to help their be an alignment between many of
the managers about what the "right thing" to do is. We, and they, are
not even sure what the correct thing to do is right now, it could well
be to drop it completely, it could be to open source it - nobody yet
knows. All we're working on is trying to get everyone there to start at
least walking in the same direction, and hopefully one day marching to
the same tune.
We've got pages and pages of notes (and business cards!) about our
recent conversations with everyone there. If I wrote everything down as
an email here I'd be typing for the next couple of weeks! We're spending
probably 60 to 90 minutes a day on the phone right now working with
people inside Sun. If it is not obvious by now, then it should be stated
that at no time are we, or have we, been working with whatever Doug is
proposing. As far as I'm aware, nobody in Sun's management that we've
spoken to is aware of the proposal that he's working on right now. I'm
just as intrigued as the rest of you are.
--
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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