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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

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Ted Leung takes issue with my response to Anne's 'Jakarta on Mono' idea. He says:

Unfortunately, for Simon, he's throwing rocks in a glass house. Sun is the company that said they would standardize Java in ECMA and then backed out. Sun is the company that the ASF has had to beat repeatedly in order to fix the "process bugs". We still don't have an open source JVM. Until that changes, Java is not open. When people have to pay money to get certification, that's not open.

He's not very fond of Sun as I discovered when we met in Seattle a while back, and he's found some old rocks to throw. I'll try to debunk them; my intent is friendly, Ted!

"Sun is the company that said they would standardize Java in ECMA and then backed out."

As I have heard it told (I was, like Ted, at IBM at the time), Sun genuinely wanted to lodge the Java language standard at ECMA but found there was no way to maintain the trademark on the name 'Java' and thus be able to enforce compatibility. The desire to enforce compatibility was still a high priority at the time due to one of Ted's near-neighbours and Sun reluctantly withdrew from ECMA rather than create an 'embrace & extend & extinguish' opportunity. Instead it committed to making the JCP into at least as good an open standards forum.

"Sun is the company that the ASF has had to beat repeatedly in order to fix the 'process bugs'."

But they got fixed. I know personally how frustrating it was for people at Apache, but Sun's genuine intent always was (and is) to make the Java process 100% compatible with open source. I admitted in my posting that the progress hadn't been at the speed the independent spirits at Apache had wanted but Ted didn't quote or note that. The point of the posting though was that the intent is open and the bugs are fixable. I contend that's not true of C#/CLI.

"We still don't have an open source JVM. Until that changes, Java is not open."

Well actually we do, but that's not the point. What Ted means is that Sun hasn't made implementations of any of the Java platform profiles available in an open source format. But then, neither has IBM, which has clean-room implementations of various Java profiles but has so far declined to make their code open source. In fact, there are several members of the Java community that could create an open source implementation if they chose to. So far everyone seems content to use traditionally-developed JVMs from IBM, Sun, JRockit and others rather than one of the open source ones.

"When people have to pay money to get certification, that's not open."

As Ted indicates, the use of the Java specifications is open and royalty free on condition that implementors take the certification tests provided by the JSR specification lead before distribution. The reason for this one requirement is that Sun believe Java platform compatibility is the 'crown jewels' and is responsible for creating a diverse, rich, open market with a choice of (mostly) interoperable vendor and open source solutions. Take away the compatibility requirement and, Sun asserts, we'll fairly quickly see partial implementations of Java specifications that mix in proprietary code at the cost of compatibility and then, there goes the neighbourhood.

Certification costs real money - the test suite is huge and complex and usually requires extensive support from technical staff - so the JCP allows spec leads to charge for it, and indeed Sun, IBM, Nokia and others all do so. Of course not everyone has to pay when Sun is the spec lead as there's a fund to pay the costs for no-profit organisations. So overall this seems to be the best compromise; maintain compatibility, require certification, waive charges for non-profits. What's the problem?

At the end, Ted says "Let's take the CLI and chart our own course." Why not take Geronimo and chart your own course, Ted? Why build Microsoft's brand equity in C#/CLI? After all, as Noel Bergman has said, "history bears witness to the fact that EVERY time Microsoft has opened something up, it has been nothing more than the specialized dorsal fin of an anglerfish."

posted at 4:31 PM (UK) | |