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Over at groklaw they discuss some recent statements in Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog about ms now suing. Even Mark Shuttleworth says a few words about Microsoft and patents. Jonathan doesn't say they will not sue but makes some comments about it and Mark says he doesn't think they will.

Free Software Has No Pirates Mod me up, Scotty.

There are certainly better solutions to this problem in the open source world. Sun isn't very good at explaining what "trusted JDS" is, but this screenshot on an engineer's blog gives you a clue that it might help in cases such as this. In the screenshot, someone tries to cut and paste text from a high security classification document into a lower security classification and an error popup warns that this isn't posisbl. In this particular instance you'd disallow this document's author from ever cutting and pasting anything!

Java is not any kind of standard.

don't know what you're talking about with HTML, Microsoft has been a member of the W3C since its inception.
You are suggesting that they joined W3C BEFORE they ripped off their brower from spyglass? MS did not join for the first 2 years of W3C's history.

Sun and IBM are not collaborating on this. Sun is using its Darkstar gaming server to deliver Menlo Park 2.0. IBM is using a private island in Second Life. No connection - just a similar initiative.

Sun and IBM are not collaborating on this. Sun is using its Darkstar gaming server to deliver Menlo Park 2.0. IBM is using a private island in Second Life. No connection - just a similar initiative.

Caldera bought DR-DOS from Novell in 1996, for $400 thousand, long after the alleged damage to the product had been done. The company settled with Microsoft over the DR-DOS lawsuit for an 'undisclosed sum' in January 2000, which Microsoft valued at $155 mn, but others speculated was actually 'much higher'.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/600488.stm

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/ArticleID/804 5/8045.html?Ad=1

In August 2000, Caldera agreed to acquire the Santa Cruz Operation's Unix products, including UnixWare and the SCO name. Caldera later changed its name to The SCO Group, but Caldera management remained in charge, i.e. the company was actually Caldera, not the old Santa Cruz Operation, which became Tarantella, and in 2005 was acquired by Sun Microsystems.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/08/02/ 000802hncaldera.html

http://www.sun.com/software/tarantella/index.xml

Caldera's financial statements (see www.sec.gov) show it lost more money in 1999 and 2000 than its total revenue for each year, and had negative cash flows from operations. How was such a company able to issue equity that investors actually bought, pay for its ongoing losses and come up with enough money to acquire and sustain UnixWare, another loss-making business, along with the SCO name, in a deal valued at $91 mn? The answer is that the entire operation was funded by the DR-DOS lawsuit.

http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/linux/c aldera-buys-sco-unix-professional-services/

http://www.newsforge.com/os/04/03/30/0047220.shtml

You would be wise to listen to the customers you're threatening to sue - they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation. Remember, they wouldn't be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark.

All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach.

That's not a genie any litigator I know can put back in a bottle."

Source: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did

The new things like zones and zfs don't need all the new extra crud but its nearly impossible to build a lean system with solaris 10.

The data in the file could have just gone in a nice plane text file but I guess the coders missed the Windows registry too much.

it's just a pain in the ass after using almost any Linux distro.

Actually, using a Linux distro after using/administering Solaris for 10+ years is a pain in the ass. It is just a matter of what you are used to.

Sun's problem is that not only is everything surrounding that kernel stagnant, but that it really hasn't done the basic things needed to build a real community.

See, and there is where you and I differ in our opinions. I am more concerned about technical support. There is a user community out there (Open Solaris, comp.unix.solaris in Usenet, Sun Managers mailing list, Big Admin, etc.) but those are not central for the seasoned Solaris sys admin. They sure are useful but having kick-ass technical support and a stable and reliable user and sys admin experience is much more important for a Solaris admins.

I'm talking about in the server room(maybe you are too...):

http://www.sun.com/processors/throughput/

People actually care about power use and cooling capacity.

"Just because it's a new kernel doesn't mean the syscall interface changes."

Absolutely true. On the other hand, there's no guarantee that they won't in Linux, and sometimes they do. That's the problem.

Sun Studio 11 (compiler/development IDE) is available for Linux, for free. Give it a try. On Solaris, it typically produces code that runs 10-15% faster than gcc. On Linux, the difference isn't quite so pronounced, but it's worth trying.

Like throughput computing you mean? $1Billion of revenue so far, and that's just the first iteration.

Before you take the plunge and install Solaris, you can run this handy tool to give you some idea of how well your hardware might be supported.

Sun's Business Model

If you're going to sell someone a $54,000 server, you damn well want to make sure it uses as robust an operating system behind it as possible. When you're in the business of buying and selling SPARCs, charging for OS licenses is just nickel and dime stuff.

It's a quote: see here.

I'm not really into Solaris, and only scratching the surface on Linux, but when I was looking at Solaris to see what it was about, I thought they said OpenSolaris 10 uses the "Java Desktop System"...

In short Sun is feeling the competition from the Open Source Linux. And Jeff's blog entry shows that pretty well

I don't know much about Sun but certainly they are not very happy with the way Linux is eating up Sun's share of servers.

At this juncture such an announcement does not come to me as a surprise.

~psr

I'm talking more poor applet security than poor Java desktop security. Java 6 makes Java *applications* sizzle. But for applets...

1) Poor auto-update features for client-side JVM (People do not tend to update their Java client JVM)
2) A vulnerability in the JDK or Java plugin may move all your clients into the attackable surface
3) Older JVM's (in the past) could force the application to use an older vulnerable JVM if installed
4) Stuff like java.lang.Runtime().getRuntime().exec("cmd.exe")
5) 2006 hall of fame!
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/759996
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/17981
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id =4396719
Intesting tidbit:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/434001

PS: Consider taking http://www.sans.org/ns2007/description.php?tid=447

And that would be the "different APIs" that I just referred to. Here's a newsflash. There are API differences between 1.4 and 5.0. Most of them are backwards compatible. A few (such as the enum keyword) are not. The places where backwards compatiblity is not perfect is well-documented and ALL of them are easily fixed. Here's a page with the details: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/compatibility.html.

Running code written against the 5.0 API and attempting to integrate it with code written against the 1.4 API may cause you problems if you hit one of the snags listed in that page above -- just like attempting to integrate code written against one version of GTK+ with code written against another version might cause you problems. Integrating code compiled for two different platforms WILL cause you problems. Period.

You are just being obtuse at this point.

Here is what Sun is currently offering, not counting the countless older releases and offerings by vendors other than Sun.

Every time I've had to deal with Java applications (which is frustratingly too often), no matter what version I have, it's always the wrong version. Oh, you have version A? You need version B for Program 1. Oh, you have version B? You need version C for Program 2. Oh, you have version C? You need version D for program 3. Almost every freaking time. And the failure messages are never helpful. Here, let's go ahead and run one program with the wrong version of Java:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: ui/gui/Main (Unsupported major.minor version 49.0)
                at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass0(Native Method)
                at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
                at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(Unknow n Source)
                at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
                at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(Unknown Source)
                at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
                at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
                at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
                at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
                at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
                at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
                at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(Unknown Source)


Yeah, thanks a lot, Java. That tells me an awful lot. Amazing how Java always manages to give you pages of info, of which 99% of it is irrelevant.

I wonder where these people who have good experiences with Java are coming from?

I've been doing java development for almost ten years now, so I may be a little biased, but it's not all that difficult to get started doing server and client side java.

You need 3 things: an app server, a JVM, and a good IDE.

Using all free(mostly speech,some beer) stuff here's an example:

Download and install the latest JDK. I recommend SE 1.6(no EE, or netbeans)
Download and unzip/untar the latest eclipse with webtools bundle.
Download and unzip/untar the latest tomcat

Now fire up the eclipse executable, go to the workbench and create a new project of type "dynamic web project". It'll ask you to select which app server, and you can point to tomcat from there.
Now you've got a dev enviroment for java, jsp, webservices, etc with all the goodies like debugging and code assist.

To deploy just right-click the project and export as a war file that you can place into another app server.

According to this, if you want to get involved in JavaFX/Mobile, you should join OpenJFX and wait apparently:

http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/mobile/getstart ed.jsp

"Join the Java community so you can participate in forums and discussions regarding the future direction of the JavaFX Mobile software system:"

Hard to tell for sure, but seems like it will be open at some point.

Jonathan Schwartz's blog appears to have a pic:

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/

How do they compare? Sun's system is running on the OpenMoko hardware (FIC Neo 1973), i.e., they are one and the same. You can see it clearly from the pictures: OpenMoko Neo 1973 vs. new Sun offering. Plainly this is the exact same hardware.

I wonder why that wasn't in the Summary.

Have you read Jonathan Schwartz's Blog? http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/when_not_where / That seems to indicate that all of the Sun IP in JavaFX (not just JavaFX/Script) will be made available under GPL in the future.

Pretty Picture here http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/when_not_where

--Woof!

About half-way down the page at
  http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/when_not_where
And it's a platform for apps on handheld hardware, so
it's arguably pretty much just a JVM and some support
libs.

--dave

After reading Jonathon's Blog (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/when_not_wher e/) it would appear that the all of JavaFX/mobile will be released under GPL in the future. I would have to assume that this will be
like the GPL versions of Java SE which not completely GPL yet but are missing a number of pieces of licensed code that is yet to be opensourced or replaced with opensource alternatives. Hence the need for an OEM licensed version to get a supported version with all the non-opensourced components present.

here's the webcast of the session the phone introduction starts at ~22.00 minutes into the video. It's a complete touchscreen interface, fits into the palm nicely (looks smaller than iPhone?) and has an icon-driven GUI that looks suspiciously similar to the iPhone.

As of yesterday (8 mai 2007) sun released the JDK under the GPL2.
Once the rush is over, go to https://openjdk.dev.java.net/ and have a look around for a free implementation.
AFAIK one of the main devels of KAFFEE is now one off five people looking over openjdk.

see http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/2007/articles/openj dk_sands.jsp for an interview

Well at the moment it's still a bit slower than flash. But anyhow, here are some samples of JavaFX "websites"

http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/resource/demo2.jn lp

Right now they run as regular java apps, but imagine a lightweight plugin in your browser for that.

Target audience asshat. Seriously, if you can't see the value of your site being read from phones, gaming systems, and a gamut of other weird little web browsers then you really don't understand the blah blah blah...

So I'm assuming this is the same thing as F3 that Chris Oliver has been working on and posting to his blog for sometime? The syntax looks the same.

I think he was referring to this site which is the one that most people link to when they want to tell someone to install Java.. because Sun recommends you link to this site.

Anyway, I tried java.com, using Mozilla Firefox, and it gave me this page which is really quite good. One thing I gotta ask though, why is Sun asking me to install an unsigned extension? Why can't they go get a signing certificate already?

> I don't see this as being any different from WebStart,
> which everyone loves to hate because it is so clunky.

JWS is pretty sweet for internal apps, though. I wrote a Swing client for a J2EE app for an internal group and folks were quite happy with the easy updates. They'd suggest a change and half an hour later I'd come buy their office, ask them to restart the app, and the new version would get downloaded and Bob's your uncle. Pretty sweet.

The JavaFX code looks pretty nice, and here's the original press release (got it from thenewsroom).

A demo of JavaFX (embedded in Java WebStart--yuck) can be found at http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/ . Seeing as flash comes up instantly in browsers, even if it takes some time to download code, etc, and that web pages with ajax also render near instantly, I don't see how JavaFX is really going to appeal to end users. The JVM plugin still takes time to load on all browsers and platforms and is quite big. And on almost all browsers and platforms I've ever used, tends to lock up the browser for 10-20 seconds at a time. Further how will JavaFX integrate with HTML? Javascript?

Flash and .NET don't have these problems, mainly because flash is a fraction of the size of the entire JVM adn runtime, and .NET is always loaded and ready to go on windows.

Anyway, given the current state of Java technology in the browser, I don't see this as being any different from WebStart, which everyone loves to hate because it is so clunky.

I dislike the idea of Silverlight entirely, particularly anything that relies on .NET (mono notwithstanding). I really want to like Java, I really do.

If this is what's been known as F3, then the guy who wrote it has been posting some pretty impressive demos for a while now.

Sun is releasing the Java libraries under the GPLv2. The article never really explicitly makes that clear, but given that they're talking about the Java2D library it should be deadly obvious that they're releasing the entire J2SE library under the GPLv2.

Sun is releasing the Java libraries under the GPLv2. The article never really explicitly makes that clear, but given that they're talking about the Java2D library it should be deadly obvious that they're releasing the entire J2SE library under the GPLv2.

Therefore, in the future IPv6-based Internet, we expect many devices to have two kinds of IP addresses:

        * Unique, stable addresses, assigned in any of several possible ways (e.g., by manual configuration, by an address server like DHCP, or by auto-configuration using embedded, factory-assigned LAN addresses), for the purpose of being a target, and for use when initiating communication to other, trusted targets, such as targets within the same home or enterprise.

        * Temporary, transient addresses, such as those containing a random number in place of a factory-assigned serial number, for use when initiating communication to less trusted targets, such as public web servers.

The choice of which kind of address to use when initiating communication is somewhat analogous to the choice that must be made when placing a telephone call in the presence of the "Caller ID" feature, i.e., whether or not to reveal the calling party's number to the called party. IPv6 addresses offer both choices.

I'm giving up mod points on this article, but given the amount of misinformation you're getting, its better that I post a reply.

Sun isn't using GPLv2, they are using GPLv2 + the Classpath exception. This is a modification to the GPLv2 pioneered by the GNU Classpath project. It basically makes Java's code GPL, but doesn't require code running on the JVM, or using the J2SE libraries, to be GPLv2 complaint.

Links here:
http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/faq.js p#g5
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t84256.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception

from: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/rampant_layerin g_violation

text follows:

Rampant Layering Violation?

Andrew Morton has famously called ZFS a "rampant layering violation" because it combines the functionality of a filesystem, volume manager, and RAID controller. I suppose it depends what the meaning of the word violate is. While designing ZFS we observed that the standard layering of the storage stack induces a surprising amount of unnecessary complexity and duplicated logic. We found that by refactoring the problem a bit -- that is, changing where the boundaries are between layers -- we could make the whole thing much simpler.

An example from mathematics (my actual background) provides a useful prologue.

Suppose you had to compute the sum, from n=1 to infinity, of 1/n(n+1).

Expanding that out term by term, we have:
1/(1*2) + 1/(2*3) + 1/(3*4) + 1/(4*5) + ...

That is,
1/2 + 1/6 + 1/12 + 1/20 + ...

What does that infinite series add up to? It may seem like a hard problem, but that's only because we're not looking at it right. If you're clever, you might notice that there's a different way to express each term:
1/n(n+1) = 1/n - 1/(n+1)

For example,
1/(1*2) = 1/1 - 1/2
1/(2*3) = 1/2 - 1/3
1/(3*4) = 1/3 - 1/4

Thus, our sum can be expressed as:
(1/1 - 1/2) + (1/2 - 1/3) + (1/3 - 1/4) + (1/4 - 1/5) + ...

Now, notice the pattern: each term that we subtract, we add back. Only in Congress does that count as work. So if we just rearrange the parentheses -- that is, if we rampantly violate the layering of the original problem by using associativity to refactor the arithmetic across adjacent terms of the series -- we get this:
1/1 + (-1/2 + 1/2) + (-1/3 + 1/3) + (-1/4 + 1/4) + ...

or
1/1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + ...

In others words,
1.

Isn't that cool?

Mathematicians have a term for this. When you rearrange the terms of a series so that they cancel out, it's called telescoping -- by analogy with a collapsable hand-held telescope. In a nutshell, that's what ZFS does: it telescopes the storage stack. That's what allows us to have a filesystem, volume manager, single- and double-parity RAID, compression, snapshots, clones, and a ton of other useful stuff in just 80,000 lines of code.

A storage system is more complex than this simple analogy, but at a high level the same idea really does apply. You can think of any storage stack as a series of translations from one naming scheme to another -- ultimately translating a filename to a disk LBA (logical block address). Typically it looks like this:
filesystem(upper): filename to object (inode)
filesystem(lower): object to volume LBA
volume manager: volume LBA to array LBA
RAID controller: array LBA to disk LBA

This is the stack we're about to refactor.

First, note that the traditional filesystem layer is too monolithic. It would be better to separate the filename-to-object part (the upper half) from the object-to-volume-LBA part (the lower half) so that

From Sun:

"If you're willing to take on the entire software stack, there's a lot of innovation possible."

Jeff Bonwick
Distinguished Engineer
Chief Architect of ZFS
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Here you go ZFS or here.

From my experience, Google Apps is way more reliable than a home server - plus you can easily access your apps from home, work, vacation, etc. I run a home server at zicatela.net and have to call home when the cleaner "accidentally" unplugs it and I lose my site, iTunes, etc.

Personally I believe the distinction between client and server will blur in the future, and that projects such as Sun's Celeste will grow P2P services from today's server-centric approach.