The Curious Incident of Sun in the Night-Time 370
Joe Barr writes "NewsForge is carrying a story by Richard Stallman which blasts Sun's recent Java move, claiming it is deceptive and self-serving, makes Java neither free nor even open source, and leaves him wondering why it has attracted so much attention."
Before all the.... (Score:5, Informative)
[mildly offtopic] - Does anyone know what the significance of the title stallaman chose? It's too close to the book [randomhouse.co.uk] to not be a reference, but I'm just not getting it...
Re:Before all the.... (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps RMS is suggesting that a lot of people took the overhyped media version of what occured at face value, instead of looking into it for themselves and seeing whether this was truly an open source license?
Re:Before all the.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Okay, so I know that RMS is a little out there (Score:5, Informative)
He actually uses this quote in the essay.
Stallman still doesn't get it (Score:3, Informative)
There's a couple things he missed in the article.
One is a nitpick. The way the DLJ goes, we require one person per organization to agree to the license. Not per user, per organization. In the debian bundles that's handled through a debconf key that remembers the license has been seen and agreed to. An administrator for an organization could distribute that debconf key and then silently install Java across their organization. At least that's what I've been told is possible.
The other thing he missed is the other announcement last Tuesday. The "it's not a matter of whether, but how" comment.
Where is the "blasting"????? (Score:4, Informative)
It's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, not Haddon. (Score:3, Informative)
He actually uses this quote in the essay.
Re:Before all the.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Before all the.... (Score:3, Informative)
It's a Sherlock Holmes reference.
The curious incident was that the dog didn't bark.
Rather co-incidentally, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday a couple of days
back.
Re:I'm so sick of Stallman (Score:3, Informative)
So maybe you are the one coming off as ignorant. IMHO you should be quiet and stay out of discussions you know nothing about.
Re:Hmmm??? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I wish I could understand (Score:3, Informative)
Um, perhaps you're thinking of a different Stallman, but I was pretty sure that RMS's ability was pretty well established [wikipedia.org].
Re:Sun has no obligation... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Crushing? how? (Score:3, Informative)
OSS hasn't posed a serious threat, yet. But if Mono does take off, Microsoft will be looking to crush it. Which means that they'll use any dirty trick they can think of, including patent warfare. While they're pretty new to patents these days, I have no doubt that they'll abuse them if they need to. Some examples of former history:
- Microsoft promised "royalties" to SpyGlass for each copy of IE sold. IE was released for free, thus Microsoft didn't have to pay.
- Microsoft refused to license Windows 95 to IBM in time for the launch if IBM didn't sever their relationship with Netscape.
- Microsoft "offered" to make Netscape a Windows-only product, and threatened to crush them if they didn't agree. (We know what happened there.)
- Microsoft annouced the non-existant Windows product when Visi-On became a threat to their DOS market.
- Microsoft refused to license NT 4.0 code to Citrix so that Citrix could update their NT 3.51 product. Instead, Citrix was "graciously" offered to give their technology to Microsoft in exchange for the ability to market their ICA protocol as an add-on to the Windows Terminal Services product created with Citrix's technology.
- Microsoft sics the BSA on companies who refused to upgrade to the latest version of Windows. (Because they must be pirating, you know.)
Those are just a few off the top of my head. There's a whole backlog of Microsoft's misdeeds that I could dig up. The scary part is that former Microsoft employees often admit to these misdeeds with pride! (see: Barbarians Lead by Bill Gates for an example.) Microsoft will do anything it takes to ensure dominance. They are not an entity you willingly trust if you can help it.
There are plenty of Java libraries that are not part of Sun's source, and whose specs are not even freely available.
Name one. I dare you. I'm willing to bet you'll find the specs right here [jcp.org].
Of course if you RTFA, you would know that this is what Stallman means when he refers to the "Java trap".
No, this is not what Stallman refers to. He believes that Java is a trap because the source code is not "free as in freedom", and that you'll be "trapped" by the convenience. He also complains that Sun doesn't allow him to call his software an implementation of a standard unless he's 100% compliant with the standard. (Duh.) God forbid that Sun require that implementations of a standard actually implement the standard.
Re:Understandable (Score:3, Informative)
Free Java was making its own inroads and there were several people working on various angles of it (Kaffe, the Transgaming company, Classpath, Japhar and much more). The fact that a full Java later struggled is a topic worth debating, and I have put some thoughts in a recent blog post here [tirania.org].
Now, that being said, I am amused by your suggestion that *I* have to work on the projects that *you* consider important.
If you consider free Java important enough, you should step up and make it happen (contribute code, time or money). Am surprised that I have to spell this out for you.
Miguel.
Re:Understandable (Score:3, Informative)
Mono has an optimizing JIT compiler for a number of architectures (x86, x86-64, Itanium, SPARC, SPARCv9, S390 and S390x mainframes, PowerPC and StrongARM) and works on a variety of operating systems beyond Linux, MacOS and Windows (see our web site for details).
Regarding
These projects include Banshee and MonoDevelop, they are both using our C# 2.0 compiler with generics now (which we have had complete for a long time).
Now the open source ecosystem created on top of Java is just fantastic, it has created a lot of really innovative pieces. Apache in particular has become a highly efficient machine that pumps out useful code, most of it written in Java.
You could either accept that there will be diversity in the form of languages, runtimes, frameworks and libraries and live a happy life, or you can try to embark yourself on a crusade to evangelize the entire world to use your favorite technology and become a bitter old man (or a bitter teenager).
Peace and Love,
Miguel.