Slashdot Mirror
Lutris, Close Source, And The Open Source Community
sohp writes "Back in mid-September Slashdot ran the story "Lutris Closes Enhydra Source" regarding that company's decision to retract its open source licensing terms. Now George C. Hawkins has reconstructed the pre-closed source reality and discusses it at How Lutris betrayed the Open Source Community
. Short summary: blaming Sun was a smokescreen. Interesting use of web archive sites, too." There's definitely a lot of strong feelings against Lutris in the linked piece, but there's also a lot of validity as well.
If you reply to every comment out there, everyone will know you're a scam. Moron.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
There are many reasons why Java has never taken off in the Free Software world, but probably the biggest reason is that Free Software advocates couldn't care less about Java's so-called platform independence. First of all, Java didn't support any Free Software platforms for quite a while, and even now there isn't really a decent Java 2 JVM for the BSDs. What's the use of platform independence if it doesn't support any of the platforms you are interested in? Secondly, the Free Software developers failed to see the benefits of using Java. One of the real draws to using Java was the binary compatibility across platforms. But that is only a minor feature if the source is open and gcc will compile it. Most Free Software developers would gladly give up binary compatibility across platforms if the source is portable to a pile of platforms and can be compiled to the native instruction set. This gives you all of the advantages of Java's Write Once Run Anywhere without the performance penalty of interpretted code.
And to top it off Sun won't even open up the code to Java. So that leaves the Free Software community with the tedious chore of creating their own implementation of Java and chasing after Sun's official version. It's a small wonder that most Free Software developers have simply chosen to focus on improving Free Software tools instead.
My guess is that this hands off attitude will pay off in the long run. Microsoft is making a concerted effort to shift Java developers to C#. Since most Java developers currently develop and deploy on Windows machines Sun is vulnerable to Microsoft's marketing in this area. If Sun wants Java to continue to thrive, then they are going to need the Open Source communities, and they aren't going to get them until they pony up the source code.
Even then there's no guarantee that Free Software developers will adopt Java. After all, Free Software developers, by and large, are pretty happy with the tools they are using now.