There's a lot of misinformation in this thread ... so even though I'm no longer in the JavaSE team I want to give some corrections.
"Why Sun has ceded the writing of Java for the Mac platform *to* Apple is still a mystery to me, and probably always will be. " -- This is really very simple. The idea for a long time around Java has been that Sun licenses the rights to technology to companies who then port Java source to their platform. It's up to the given vendors to port and support Java on their platform. The original deal between Microsoft and Sun was in that form, that Microsoft was the licensee and were responsible for Java-on-windows but those of us with a good memory for the history remember that Microsoft violated the license agreement and Sun won a $2 billion judgment against Microsoft for having broken that license agreement. In any case if you're crying about why Sun has ceded writing Java for OS X to Apple, why aren't you also crying about Sun ceding Java on IBM's operating systems to IBM? Are you expecting Sun to do a good job of writing Java for z/OS ??? "Since Sun has historically given Java short shrift on Linux" .. "JDK1.6_10 was one of the first ones I can remember that was released on Linux at the same time as on Windows. " ... This is pretty much untrue. Beginning with 1.3.x Sun began shipping JDK's for Linux. I don't recall when we started shipping them at the same time but it was way way way before 6u10. Linux JDK's are tested alongside the other releases and released at the same time and this has been the case for several years. Until my RIF two days ago I managed the release of the DLJ bundles, which are in turn used widely by Linux distros, and know very well that at least for 1.5.x and 6uX the status of JDK releases on Linux. There were sometimes delays in releasing the DLJ bundles but that was due to the process for DLJ bundles had never been automated. The release of the main JDK bundles (the ones you get at java.sun.com and java.com) is run by a highly automated build farm. Conversely the DLJ bundles were manually created by taking apart JDK bundles and putting a different license file in, and then by using rsync to copy to download.java.net. Sometimes there were delays in getting DLJ bundles released but I had diligently worked on decreasing that so that for the last several releases the DLJ version was released within a couple hours of the main JDK release. "As to why Sun ceded JDK ports to Apple, I'm guessing the reason is simply one of resources. " -- There is a lot of truth to this concept as it would not be a very scalable thing for one organization to handle porting something like Java to all the different computing platforms that exist. I think it was wise to license the technology and let other companies do the porting work. The word 'cede' is incorrect here as it is a technology licensing deal. IBM is properly motivated to ensure Java runs well on z/OS but do you think Sun would be as motivated to do so? I don't think so ... so why would Sun be motivated to do an OS X port? Actually that last point raises an observation from my work in the JavaFX team. For JavaFX Sun did the OS X port themselves. The reason? The JavaFX management sees all those graphical designers using OS X as their preferred environment and ergo reasoned it's important to have JavaFX support on OS X. "Sun sued MS for *not* including the type of Java they wanted distributed. " -- Please learn your history. Sun sued MS for violating the contract and shipping a thing they claimed was Java but did not match the Java specification. It's clear from the rest of your writing you want Java to be Java on every platform but MS basterdised it and if they had been successful you'd be bitching today about how writing to MS's Java means your code is unportable just like writing to Internet Exploiter today also makes your code unportable. http://weblogs.java.net/blog/robogeek/archive/2007/08/java_is_doomed.html -- has a blog post I made some time ago that retells some history. I also suggest yahoogling "Microsoft Java Incompatibility" and look for a ZDNET article from 1997ish which goes into excruciating details on the differences someone would see by using Microsoft's implementation of what they called Java. "Again, if Java is key to their future, being more in control of how and when versions shipped would seem to be paramount. Leaving these decisions to competitors" -- Yeah, there is a certain amount of wisdom to this. For that matter are those competitors properly incentivised to support Sun's technology? In the 1990's there was this coopetition word that was coined, and Java is a great example of this. Cooperating with competitors is a very tricky dance to play. I don't know what the best is. However having been working within the OpenJDK project for a long time my personal opinion is it would be advantageous for all involved if the licensees were cooperating inside the OpenJDK project rather than the old paradigm of technology licensing. But even making that change would be extremely tricky to accomplish and it's not clear whether everybody involved sees this the same way I see it. "I guess I'm not sure how things like Firefox and libsdl, with clearly fewer resources than Sun, manage to get their stuff ported to OSX. " -- Open source volunteers have different incentive factors than employees of a corporation. Further it's more efficient to cooperate on a common code base in a shared source repository than having arms length technology licensing and no sharing of code. "Who created the OSX versions of Ruby and Python? Did Apple do it? I think Ruby is bundled with OSX, but I'm not sure who did the port. " -- Also the other P languages (Perl, PHP).. Apple could have done it themselves but consider this. All those languages are much easier to port amongst Unix-like systems than is Java. That's because JavaSE drags along with it a requirement to support GUI technologies because AWT, 2D, Sound, Swing, etc are part of the platform spec. That requirement makes the port much harder than it would for those P languages that don't have their own GUI toolkits. Perhaps the new minimized Java profile ("??project jigsaw???") will improve this situation as it's goaling includes support for a GUI-less Java implementation. "Up to date Java is being kept off the Mac by Apple, though. " -- Yeah. It's real irritating, isn't it. I know it has been irritating to me. If you are so motivated there is a porting project underway on the openjdk project, look for the bsd-port project. The goal is to integrate support from the BSD/Java team into OpenJDK and one of the side goals has been to integrate the SoyLatte work by Landon Fuller into the same project. That team could use some help. "As a commercial licensee of Sun Java, Apple may not be able to open source their implementation " -- As I said there are many tricky considerations to such a result. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
