The OP is right that Microsoft puts more resources into their development infrastructure. I don't believe that they are better, but we don't need to open that can of worms right now.
I also agree with the OP that this is because of money motivation. Look at Microsoft's financial statement. Dev tools are a big profit center for them. > "Your comparison with C# didn't make any sense whatsoever to me. They > are in _exactly_ the same boat. They are both free and open source" Microsoft offers free versions of most of their tools like Visual Studio Express, for example. But of the many dozens of Microsoft- focused software shops I've known or worked with, *all* of them have a full MSDN subscription. Even small, two people companies that I know, pay for an MSDN subscription. On the flip side, I know many teams that just use the free version of Eclipse or NetBeans or MySQL (not Java, I know). I've never even known a company in real life that paid for professional support on something like MySQL or Hibernate. The idea of paying $5000+ for "professional support" is laughable at the kinds of companies I work for. I'm probably simplifying, but: Sun made most of their money from selling hardware. IBM makes most of their money from business consulting services. Microsoft makes most of their money from selling software licenses. This may change, but currently, Microsoft's business of selling software is just a more natural fit for a large, profitable proprietary development toolchain. > "4. The open source ideal of a developer scratching his/her own itch doesn't > apply because "I think a closure here would save me four lines of code so > I'm going to spend 20 hours a week for the next four years making it happen" > doesn't make sense. If an individual did make this commitment it would be > out of altruism, not motivated self interest." The OP is completely wrong on this one. Working on the Java platform is extremely prestigious, intellectually and academically exciting, high profile, high status work. That's *exactly* the kind of project that super-smart people like to work on as a hobby out of self interest. There are dozens of less prestigious areas of Java platform that could benefit from more paid resources, but something as intellectually high- profile as closures gets tons of talented hobbyist attention. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
