On 8/17/2010 9:28 PM, Sean Comerford wrote:
The big thing I keep seeing in all this "concern about Oracle" is that
people continually forget or ignore WHY Sun and Java is now owned by
Oracle: Sun focused on the wrong things (including being OVERLY
concerned with the community) which led to them losing money year
after year after year basically from 2001 til the end.
And like it or not, companies exist to make money (which benefits us
by allowing us to get paid to work for them).
So yes, Oracle is going to change some stuff.... and in fact they MUST
change the things that made Sun non-profitable.
And unfortunately the things that make companies profitable are not
always "community" friendly. We as engineers love "open source" b/c it
means our projects are more profitable and we look like heroes which
leads to big raises + bonuses. But there wasn't much profit in that
model for Sun and Oracle is smart enough to know there won't be for
them either.
As far as the JDK lawsuit, like most things in life, I suspect the
truth will end being somewhere in the middle (part money grab by
Oracle, part legitimate beef against bastardization of technology they
paid a fortune to acquire). But I seem to recall Sun suing a company
several years back on similar grounds... and in that case there was no
community angst b/c the target of the suit was everyone's favorite
"evil software tycoon" Micro$oft.
Microsoft left Sun precious little choice. Sun had to fight them or
let Microsoft create a vendor-lock-in version of Java and steer most
Windows developers there.
The difference here is that it would appear that Sun left Google
precious little choice -- other than to use something entirely
dissimilar not only to the Java language but to the Java Virtual
Machine. [Charging an arm-and-a-leg for long-in-the-tooth Java ME
technology didn't really leave Google much choice.]
--
Jess Holle
--
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.
