"Robert S. Sfeir" wrote:
Did you read the license agreement for Microsoft?I have read Microsoft license agreements and I do agree that it is quite bad. And just as you said this is something the industry has been able to "get away with". However, as I understand, this particular section has been added due to the Java Web Start component bundled with JSDK 1.4. My question is was there any crying need for putting this component in as a required component of JDK, and then impose such a license term? This takes away a lot from the advantages offered by JavaYou'd better, because quite honestly it's worse. Further, these terms
have been in just about every software package I've ever used. This is
our industry and something our industry has been able to get away with.
Our government is not about to put a choke on the terms they specify
simply because it would also choke the growth of the industry. There
is no such thing as 'safe' software, well maybe a hello world app, but
beyond that you simply can never guarantee a bug free piece of software
and as such, the company needs to cover it's butt; Right or Wrong.
You are quite right in pointing out that no one can ever guarantee a bug free software, but this is not a case of bugs, is it?. This is actually taking away or taking over the control of a piece of hardware without any information to the user or administrator. Especially considering the enormous security risks that enterprise apps are exposed to nowadays isn't this going a bit too far?
I hope not. If you would just take a gander at the developers list of Mono I believe you would be convinced that good people are interested in C# and very good apps can be developed using this language.
Finally, if you're switching to C# because of terms and conditions,
then you never understood why you were using Java, and it is obviously
not important to you (or your client apparently) which language you use.
Also there are the words of a sensei, "in a battle it is not the weapons used by the warrior that matters, but the warrior himself". Java is not the holy Grail as some have made it out to be. It is a very good object-oriented language and it has done a lot to the world of Open Source Computing and Networked Computing, but it is not the last word in computing. Python is another very good language that is object-oriented, has a very good architecture and lets itself very well to designing frameworks with.
I believe that with JSDK 1.4 Sun Microsystems has made a lot of mistakes as bundling Xalan, Xerces and the regexp packages inside rt.jar and also putting in the Web Start component. The Open Source initiatives make large strides in short periods of time, but JDK will not be able to keep up with that. Of course, we can resort to overriding the system parameters by code or by commandline arguments or by putting these components in the endorsed directory, but this is just a work-around.
Let us hope that just as with SOAP, Sun will see the light and reverse these policies (plus the mulish stand on WSI), which will not, in the long run, benefit them or the developers. As you may know there are still quite a lot of managers who swear by other commercial technologies and you will admit that it will be quite difficult to persuade them otherwise while they have these issues to beat Java with.
S.T.K
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