Well, from my perspective, ASF is making a mistake. As you most likely don't know, I and Dick are Java Champions which means we get to participate in discussion with various people in Oracle. What I can say is that about a month before JavaONE, the JC group as a whole started taking Oracle to task for being so silent on things. Every so slowly since then the Java guys have been allowed to engage us in conversations that are pretty much verbotten in other parts of the company. Every time bad news has hit or bad things happened, people in Oracle wanted to go back to the old days where PR controls everything. I'm happy to say that the Java guys have been slowly winning the ability to speak and have been able to get PR to realize that the old ways are not working.. and in recent weeks, speak is what they've been doing. Some of the conversation has been very rough. It has eaten up time from people that are responsible for delivering 7.0, but it has been productive. Most of the recent postings on what is happening with Java are FUD. The announcement from QCon wasn't really all that clear and it got reported as something that just isn't going to happen.
However, there are still a few outstanding questions and Apache is one of them. I don't have an answer except to say that it appears that Apache instead of trying to work with Oracle and engage with them has decided to threaten to throw the toys out of the pram. I would be a shame if they did this however, the JCP would go on though it would be weaker without that strong open voice. That said, there are some radical elements in the ASF that seem to want to bash Oracle (Sun) for the sake of bashing them. My conversation with those in Apache that I know was to ask the question, has someone broken a legal agreement to which the answer from ASF's POV is yes. But in reality, the question is answered with OpenJDK licensing. They can fork OpenJDK and they are clear. Yet the refuse due to some ideological position that was encouraged by IBM (in their battle against Sun for things they didn't like). Another point, if someone broke a legal agreement there are legal remedies. Yet no one at ASF will stand up and say why after I don't know how many years of whining about the problem, they haven't used any of those legal remedies. And as much as I may or may not agree with them, the whining is getting really really old. I won't name names but some have been posting a lot of FUD about various things that Oracle is planning on doing. To be fair, I don't completely know what Oracle is planning on doing with Java but then neither do they and until just recently, their blogs about Oracle have all been speculation and conjecture and all based on dubious facts and in some case fiction. So, here are some facts, 1) Oracle is hiring people to work on the JDK so Java is getting more resources than it ever had 2) They are putting everything into the OpenJDK and it will remain there 3) Oracle is working hard to deliver 7.0 on time, something that Sun wasn't going to be able to do. 4) Oracle will have to deal with Sun promises that were impossible to deliver on. 5) Oracle is a corporate that has legal obligations which is takes seriously which some times prevent it from speaking 6) Oracle has a corporate culture (some what like Apple's) where all PR is carefully managed through a PR department. They are slowly learning that this doesn't work so well when dealing with community but they are learning. Pure speculation on my part. Oracle will announce in the near future that they will pick up development of the JDK for Mac OSX. My basis for the speculation is that Oracle doesn't want to give any opportunity for MS to claim a better cross platform story than Java has. Look to Devoxx in a few days where Mark Rienhold will be speaking on a panel about the future of Java. Stephan has put a few interesting characters on that panel so I expect it will be fun as well as informative. Regards, Kirk On Nov 9, 2010, at 7:10 PM, phil swenson wrote: > "The ASF will terminate its relationship with the JCP if our rights as > implementers of Java specifications are not upheld by the JCP > Executive Committee to the limits of the EC's ability. The lack of > active, strong and clear enforcement of those rights implies that the > JSPA agreements are worthless, confirming that JCP specifications are > nothing more than proprietary documentation." > > https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/statement_by_the_asf_board1 > > what are the implications of this (if any)? > > -- > 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. > -- 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.
