> Your comparison with C# didn't make any sense whatsoever to me. How is C# free? Anyone in corporate IT that does development in C# .NET purchases MSDN and/or Visual Studio. Plus, unless one uses MSDN, most C# developers will be developing on a paid-for licensed Windows OS.
Then there's SQL Server - which for a dev you can do some free stuff with, but in the end there needs to be databases that are production- like and usually those kind of installs are licensed up. Both Microsoft and Oracle have clear avenues to charge money - even from their platform developers, not just their end-user customers. At Microsoft the goal for the tools group was to generate enough revenue to be at least self-sustaining. One thing for sure is the Johnathan's gamble to drink deeply from the open source kookaide and risk that gambit with Java did not pay off. Nothing whatsoever was realized in terms of revenue that did anything to stave off the demise of Sun Microsystems (in which case demise is the loss of their independence as a company). From the board of director's point of view, he was an utter failure as a CEO and what he pitched amounted to snake oil. It's interesting to see the current stiff economic environment continue to sift out the viability of open source political ideology. It is very true that in the final analysis programmers need to eat too. And seeing open source doing a "Craig's List" number against one facet after another of our industry has been like watching a plague of locust hollowing out what were formerly fields of plenty. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
