I don't stand behind any one single major corporation, not Google nor Apple nor Microsoft nor Oracle. These all have an agenda and shareholders to meet, so if I had stocks in any of these or had worked for any of these, my view might be different.
As a geek, I care about the technology and seeing the art being pushed forward. This means that I admire Google as a pragmatic entrepreneur, Apple as an quality-driven emancipator, Microsoft as an efficient tool- chain designer and Oracle... umm well I guess they don't really represents anything too exciting, except for BTRFS and various work on Linux (certainly it's hard to be impressed by their DBMS, i.e. no boolean type and no way to tell a null and empty string apart). With that said, I do think Microsoft get's a huge amount of crap thrown at them compared to Apple and Oracle. This is apparently a way to feel superior - well manifested by the classic attack style "I'm a mac" commercials or JavaZone videos. I can appreciate this, it's always simpler when you can do a naive definition of your enemy and demonize them. And it certainly *is* a good thing to have choices! What scares me about being mostly in the Java space, is how I see tools and techniques flow unhindered from Java over to .NET, yet very few things flows the other way (a few exceptions do exist of course, like annotations and enums etc.). This is sometimes defended as "we think harder before adopting solutions", which is really just a way of saying "we're not sure about how to do this" or even worse "I don't think this will be beneficial". Only recently has it been acceptable to decry Java as a best-practice tool, thanks to Groovy and Scala in particular. So I don't denounce any one platform, except for technical reasons it's obvious that client side Java is going to be completely dead in a few years. While there may be plenty of reasons to hate Microsoft, the fact remains that Oracle seems to be where Microsoft were 10 years ago in regards to their view on open source and the community. So my view today is that (most of) Microsoft's platform is an open standard but not open source, whereas (most of) Oracle's platform is open source but not an open standard. As such, I find the culture around Mono very interesting as it represents the best of both worlds - an open source implementation of an open standard. It may not have the JSR's and a JCP, but recent events and the evolution of Java has me wondering whether I as a geek wouldn't be happier without corporate politics pulling strings I want to break loose from. /Casper On Dec 2, 9:24 pm, CKoerner <[email protected]> wrote: > These thoughts crossed my mind as I overheard one Java developer make > the usual "M$ Suxors" comments. Not that I'm a fan of .Net, but It > made me wonder: > > .. > > Now that Oracle owns Java, do you stand behind them? Which side are > you on? If you don't stand behind Oracle but use Java, are you any > better then the .Net programmer who doesn't care for Microsoft? > > Maybe you don't use Microsoft because you don't agree with their > ethics/tactics/whatever. If you don't agree with Oracles ethics/ > tactics/whatever, why as a Java developer are you any better than > said .net programmer, why do you still feel the need to look down upon > them? > > Do you think Oracle bought Java (via Sun) because they want to grow > open source? Suddenly your OSS is owned by someone just as dirty and > manipulative as Microsoft, you still feel superior? > > Can you still in good faith stand on your platform and denounce > Microsoft while the platform you uphold as the 'true and open' > platform is owned (yes owned) by Oracle. > > Do you stand behind Oracle? -- 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.
