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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Projection

I'm preparing my talk for EclipseCon and I notice yesterday's talk was by Michael Tiemann from Red Hat. I personally love the book he was citing (see my books page). While I recognise the need to make allowances for the audience he was speaking to, the report in eWeek (which I've verified with some delegates) suggests he went beyond the bounds of decency as he expounded his hatred of the Java environment and encouraged the Eclipse faithful to bring down Java from the inside.

I also feel his comments about NetBeans in the report on NewsForge need comment.

When a member of the audience asked Tiemann why he thought it was Eclipse at the tipping point and not NetBeans, Tiemann said it was because Eclipse was not locked into a single choice for development, while NetBeans is.

A quick glance at the NetBeans products page shows this just isn't true - NetBeans supports language choice too, it just does so using 100% pure java implementations so the software remains portable.

He talks of "Java apartheid" (let's ignore the irony of the politically and socially aware Tiemann trivialising the 'A' word) and claims that the Java community is uniquely opposed to open source. There are in fact plenty of open source Java projects, both on SourceForge and on java.net - the 'divisiveness' Tiemann talks about seems to be more in his rhetoric and intent, flowing more from tensions between Sun and Red Hat and from his commercial agenda than from the community reality. I think psychologists call this 'projection'.

Worse, Tiemann thinks that the answer is to get everyone to use Eclipse for everything. I think Eclipse is great stuff, but it is no more the answer to everything than Netbeans is. The reason I'll be speaking at Eclipsecon is precisely because the Java community is united in its diversity. No, Michael, the answer is not to meet hatred with hatred like this, it is instead to value other views and to meet on neutral turf to resolve any issues - Rich Main of the SAS Institute has the right idea.

posted at 8:19 AM (UK) | |