WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

I posted a photo of the participants in the open source Java debate here: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris/20040803
 

I have to agree with your characterization of Groklaw as "hatred" -- the feelings towards Sun have lost any rational basis whatsoever. Slashdot comments are often inane, but at least at the end of the day most people on Slashdot are technologists: show them some great technology, and they'll tend to recognize it as such. Groklaw, on the other hand, seems to have an underpinning that is more fundamentally religious in nature (and indeed, fundamentalist in nature): the technology doesn't matter as long as you haven't changed your religious affiliation. Fortunately, technology still (ultimately) trumps religion; the Groklaw crowd will become increasingly marginalized if they lose sight of that truism.
 

Hi Simon, I hope you had a nice trip, and it seems so judging by the writeup.

I'm, too, rather surprised by the amount of bad vibes Sun's been getting lately. I guess that Sun simply has a bit of an image problem outside of those communities where it actively perticipates and sets the pace.

I guess people are reading too much into Johnathan's ramblings about life in general, and Red Hat in particular. I think Johnathan's blog is like a test balloon setup, where he can float ideas in public without consequences as its still a private blog, see how people react, and make decisions based on that. A rather clever PR strategy, I must say. But he's a too clever guy, as far as I remember him, to seriously want to pick a fight with a social movement instead of riding on top of the wave. :)

Thanks a lot for mentioning GNU Classpath and Kaffe on the OSCON panel. I was surprised that some of the other panelists apparently were not aware of the existance of free runtimes. But that's ok, as GNU Classpath picks up the missing features, I'd expect free runtimes based on it to gain some exposure. Tomcat5 has been reported recently to run on kaffe with a small change in the startup scripts, we've merged in the AWT and Swing implemenatations from GNU Classpath, and I'm trying to get a free java orb merged in. Progress on all areas ;)

That's why I get annoyed at people from the sidelines begging, or rudely pushing Sun to make them release their source code to the VM or class libraries under a different licensing scheme. While it would be great if Sun decided to participate in projects like GNU Classpath or gcj, it's not necessary for Sun to give away their 'crown jewels'. Free runtimes have been making some really nice progress since last year, without any source code contributions from Sun. I'd give them a year and a half. and we'll have not one, but a multitude of JDK 1.4-inspired free runtimes for all sorts of systems, from embedded arm devices, to .net runtimes. Without touching any of Sun's sources.

I think we're past the point where it matters that much any more if Sun opens up their implementation or not. What matters much more now, in my opinion, is achieving compatiblity, through ensuring that GNU Classpath provides a faithful enough implementation of the class libraries that code written using GNU Classpath and code written using the JDK can interoperate without problems. Fortunately, it seems like there may be some way to access the TCK in J2SE 1.5 without getting tainted by SCSL, so I'm quite positive that Sun will be able to open up the java platform further, at their pace, and help us spread bytecode where no JVM has been before.

That pace will have to be a wise choice between Sun's needs as a proprietary Java vendor within a proprietary Java community, and Sun's needs as a free software community member. I believe that much of the perceived raft between Java and non-Java free software communities comes from what I'd call an aristocratic touch in either community: the tendency to regard one's own achievements as superior to anything else. So many people seem to prefer the relative safety of gated communities.

The 'anything but java is impure' marketing efforts have created a small, but vocal subcommunity in the java community that feels threatened by anything that is successful despite not being written in java. That kind of people makes Java look like a weird cargo cult, just like zealots from the other side of the fence give free software a bad name.

Free software doesn't work that way. It does not need artificial barriers. The GNU platform should allow you and me to easily use code written in Perl, C, C++, Python, Java, .net and so on together, instead rewriting everything from scratch to make it suitable to fit into a 'one language, one platform, one community' philosophy.

GNU Classpath and the free runtimes around it are destined to help us overcome such artificial barriers between all sorts of free Java and non-Java software. To do that, they won't need any of that funny trade mark business. They'll need to be interoperable with Java(TM). And that's a whole different story from tapping into the Java brand.

cheers,
dalibor topic