Slashdot Mirror
The Apache/Sun Relationship Worsens
d6y writes "Over on the O'Reilly weblogs there's an entry on the relationship between Sun's Java Community Process and Apache. Sun have been rubbing people up with wrong way (the problems of licensing open source J2EE containers; stuts v. JavaFaces; log4j v. JDK 1.4 logging....) and I hope this gets sorted out real soon.
See also the original VNUNet article and Apache's position paper."
Sun has always been most standoffish towards the Opensource crowd. I've never understood why so many of the Open source advocates keep putting them up on a pedastal.
They have a long history of claiming other's works as their own--Which in my opinion is the worst crime you can do against open source people, take away the credit!
1. They claimed that the blackdown port of Java to linux was theirs!
2. They "adopted" the free and entirely non-sun code base for Java Servlets (Jakarta) and claimed it was the "Sun Reference Platform"
3. They "adopted" and FSCKED UP ROYALLY the XML4J/LotusXSL stuff that IBM had created and mangled out that god-forsaken peice of crap known as JAXP.
4. At one time, Scott McNealy admitted that Sun had indeed been the brainchild behind XML.
5. They ask ECMA to rubber-stamp their Java Language as an offical standard, but allow SUN to keep all rights for licensing and changing the language as they wish. ECMA tells them to "get bent" and SUN goes off sulking to anyone who will listen. Java still remains in the hands of the nutters who thought it up.
It seems that from a cursory glance, SUN has done many things to piss off the Java and the Opensource crowds. It's a mystery to me why people attack Microsoft for crimes very similar to these, but always praise Sun for their benevolence.
At LEAST Microsoft took their language and VM to ECMA, and said standardize it, and we'll accept it. (It doesn't hurt that ECMA is pretty MS friendly, and the chairman of the TC39 committee is a MS employee, but at least they took the right steps)
Heh
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
This is really odd considering JBoss (open source) is the best J2EE webcontainer out there. Granted, it isn't part of the apache group, but is mostly used with apache webserver and the jakarta (apache subproject) tomcat servlet container.
Maybe the "big wig" J2EE containers (IBM's Websphere, and BEA's WebLogic) are getting on Sun's back because of this??
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
That's a really good point, however I must stress that when dealing with customers, (at least the ones i've dealt with) that it definitely matters. Most resellers and larger companies only deal with certified software for customers. While the "Sun Approved" stamp doesn't mean much to you or I, it does to that big corporation that has a lot invested in Sun products. From the POV of a large company, knowing that some software is going to be compatible with your large investment gives both a sense of union and a place to turn to in case something goes wrong. Usually this same thing holds true for hardware vendors...
For large organizations who (like mine) made a $50mil investment in moving to J2EE applications as a corporate standard, the Sun stamp of approval is absolutely necessary.
Personally, I'll take Tomcat/Catalina + MySQL + Velocity + PoolMan over most Java app servers, and only feel that J2EE benefits extremely large apps with the need to connect to legacy systems.
If the open source community starts to shun Java because of what Sun is doing, it will leave a huge hole and kill the momentum that has built up over the past 5 years or so.
How many of us Java developers began web-development by downloading Tomcat? How many of us love Struts and Velocity and don't want to lock our skillsets into proprietary solutions from BEA or IBM?
Sun needs to draw then walk a fine line between keeping the major app server purveyors happy while keeping the playing field open for those of us who want to use the technology, but don't have $50K handy for a single CPU license.
Mind the gap...
Only if your customers care. Certification is a way of convincing people that something is compliant without making them find out for themselves whether it's really compliant. It's like the difference between having a diploma, and having a transcript that lists all the classes necessery for graduation with passing grades. The diploma is a simple way to show, "Yes, I've graduated".
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Sun! Get with the program here. One of your most successful technologies is being directly targeted for destruction by the Evil Empire ... and you're fighting with the open source community? This is a sure-fire way to get yourself killed. You've got to have allies somewhere.
Sun's problem is that they want to be a big monopoly like Microsoft, but they aren't one. It may be totallty obvious to Slashdot readers that the only way to successfully complete with Microsoft is to be allied with the open source community, but some players (Sun, Oracle, and even Apple to some extent) still think they can "win."
The problem with the computer industry is that most of the companies involved act like spoiled children. The only exception is IBM, which is a mature company and acts like one.
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I think the reason why IBM embraces open source more than Sun is because IBM considers hardware and services to be more important (business strategy-wise) than software. Sun sees their OS as being a big part of the picture, whereas IBM sees their hardware and services as being the bigger part of the picture.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I think that the reason that IBM is devoting so many resources to Open Source is that they already had a huge programmer budget for their proprietary big iron operating systems and apps that just weren't going anywhere and weren't big selling points anyway - they were selling the hardware it ran on and applications that are still proprietary and run on Linux anyway (like DB2). Moving to open source let them spend the same or less money on development while getting for free the work of others around the world, and they got to look like good guys doing it. IBM is just spending money they were already going to spend, replacing proprietary software that was not a big part of their sales efforts.
Sun, on the other hand, is hugely invested in their software sales. They see Solaris as a big selling point when pushing their offerings, and they really *really* want to make as much money as possible off of Java. Going Open Source, no matter how much the geeks at Sun like the idea, will be a huge blow to the bottom line. IBM is replacing one set of software that was largely free (as in beer) with another set of offerings that they don't charge for, so it doesn't hurt them. Sun would be giving up revenue from software that is bringing in a lot of money. They just can't (or think they can't) afford to go completely Open Source. Opening up Java to the extent they have, while maintaining control, allows Sun to still charge for some offerings (like the compatibility tests) and have a head start over competitors in future development efforts, since only they control where Java goes. Going completely Open causes them to lose both the cash and the control, and that they'll fight to the end.
If you think IBM is really comitted to Open Source out of altruism and a philosophical agreement with the movement, try getting them to give away DB2.
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
the point is that if you are a new developer or program manager, working on a new project, and you see that the JDK tools already have an XML parser and a logging library, you're not going to even bother to look for alternatives.
Just like nobody looks for alternatives to M$ Office or M$ IE, because its already bundled by OEMs onto just about every P4 box going out the door...
its take developers of considerable experience, and influence over their manager / respect from their manager, to introduce tools to a development environment that on the surface seem redundant to the tools already at hand. right now, many of us have that experience, and the awareness of the better tools, but in a year that might not be the case...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
There are a fair amount of Open Source enthusiasts inside the company. Many of them used to be OS/2 enthusiasts, and you remember what happened with that product the moment some marketroid thought it might be inconvienent to keep producing it...
What I'm saying here is IBMs advocacy of Open Source Solutions is not in the least bit altruistic. They will continue to be our "friend" as long as they can make money off what we do. The minute that is no longer the case, they will drop us like a lead balloon. If things get really tough, don't expect them to stand by us.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The open source community needs to release a GPL version of Java. There are innumerable projects out there all of which have struggled independently to get to partial JDK 1.1 capability.
Until there is a highly competitive GPL java compiler with a full set of foundation classes, nobody should be happy about using Java because it is essentially proprietary technology.
Between GNU Classpath, gcj, jikes, KOPI, Kaffe, Japhar, and a dozen others, its amazing that Sun is so far ahead of what you can do with pure GPL.
Why flamebait, when you can throw fresh chum with no nasty hooks in it? :}
"From what I've seen, Java sucks". Does this mean you've never actually programmed in it?
ALL high-level computer languages, even C, are "hand holding". That's the point! I want my language to make my life easier by hiding the gory details, and i will use the highest-level language that can possibly work well for whatever i'm doing. In many cases, that will be Java.
If you want language-bashing, C++ is a horror. Someone please tell them that you can't solve every problem by adding a new keyword. And if you want to bring up yacc (and by extension, LALR parsing), Java is as clean as C. C itself isn't pure here... try this statement: 'if(a) if (b) something(); else something_else();' Legal C, with a shift-reduce conflict. Does the else apply to if(a), or if(b)? You DID read about LALR parsing in detail, didn't you? But that pales in comparison to C++, which simply cannot be parsed without dynamic type information in the parser. See Knuth's one-line crushing criticism of in in DDJ a few years back. But i digress.
Counting books on the shelf for a language is NO measure of its success, because most computer books are crap. The bad ones are dying off. I keep exactly two C books on my shelf - K&R and Plauger. Does this mean C is dying? No, it means those two books are so effective i don't need anything else.
As for VB... it's not a language for programmers who need hand-holding, because it's saddled with that horrible BASIC grammar that will do nothing but get in their way. If you want a language for beginners, check out Python. The worst thing about using it for a student language is that the students will be grossed out the moment they have to learn a bloated monster like C++ or Perl (not knocking Perl, it's my favorite language, but Python is better).
Java reminds me a lot of Unix... it's not perfect by any stretch, but it's so dang good that there is little point in trying to do better. Its utility as a lingua franca outweighs its minor shortcomings. The nicest thing i can say about Java is that i hardly ever come up against limitations of the language itself - if i have a language-level problem in Java, it is usually due to my own ignorance, especially ignorance of its excellent libraries.
Okay, i'll stop now.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
This isn't a Sun problem specifically - all of the companies that were using OSS to gain marketshare are wrestling with it now. Some of them have blamed Sun (Lutris) for their own inability to make OpenSource work for them. The simple fact remains that no company that needs to make profit in order to stay in business can cater to open source in the same spaces where they are trying to make money. Sun has open sourced Star Office, no biggie - doesn't make them any money really. Sun won't give away or disrupt J2EE license revenue to cater to open source because they make money from this. Anyone who doesn't understand this and thinks that Sun or any other company can just give this stuff away really needs a good class in economics and finance.
For all of the conspiracy theorists creating ludicrous examples of why Sun doesn't like Apache, let me put this into simple, obvious terms:
Now that AOL has given up on selling iplanet as a webserver (Apart from other things.), Sun is still trying to make money off of it.
Apache is iplanet's biggest competitor. Apache is free, more popular than iplanet, and considered by many people to be better than iplanet.
Every time someone runs apache on Solaris, Sun sees that as another iplanet sale lost.
Need any more details?
Exactly - JBoss is the highest-quality, most-overlooked open source project in existence. It's just absolutely fantastic. The only thing missing is clustering, but 1) I don't need it and 2) it's coming in 3.0 anyway (I've messed around with the alpha builds' clustering capabilities). I highly recommend anyone thinking about J2EE at least give JBoss a shot, and why not, it's free.
But on the other hand, I don't really have a problem with Sun not certifying it, and I don't really understand what all the fuss about it is. It's simple -- certification is a major cash cow for Sun. All the money they spend developing standards like EJB gets recouped when IBM, BEA, etc. pay to have their app servers certified. JBoss, since it's free, can't afford that. And who cares? I trust that JBoss works because I deploy EJBs and Servlets written to the standards and they Just Work. If you're in a bigger organization than I am that's spending $millions on your infrastructure so you don't just trust JBoss out of the goodness of your own heart, you have two options. 1)Test it yourself or 2)Pay IBM or BEA or someone else because they certify that they've tested it for you.
What exactly is the big problem? Sure, Sun isn't the second coming or anything, but they provide well-written open standards that are unencumbered by patents that open source projects can implement. What the hell is wrong with that?
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
I think, that lot of people are unjust casting curses to Sun. It was sun who donated most of Netscape (Mozilla), most of StarOffice (OpenOffice)and other things such as OpenLook even before Linux begun.
Whether it would happen or not, they have the right to be careful about Java spec incompatibility. Perhaps it really does cost $50k to certify it. While $50k might be a lot for Apache, it is only some 0.005% of what IBM pledged to invest to Linux. Why do not some commercilal vendors team up with IBM to foot the bill for the Apache Java?
Disclaimer:
I have no afiliation with Sun whatsoever. I jst watch what is happening. Sun just gives out great software and reaps wrath. IBM is all promisses and is praised all over Linux "community".
Oh, i like pointers. I like high-powered handguns too, but i wouldn't use them to settle ALL my social problems! Pointers are fantastic where precise memory control is required. Precise memory control is NEVER required, except for systems programming. Something like the Linux kernel should absolutely be written in C. Something like the typical business app has no business whatsoever using C. And yes, C is the mother tongue. Any professional programmer that doesn't at least understand it is severely ignorant, even if they never use it.
I wouldn't even say VB is for dabblers. I'd say it's for morons, and the poor victims who are forced to use that wretched excuse for a language. The only decent part at all is the IDE, and there are better ones.
I don't even think much about the language anymore... my programming these days is abstracted away at the problem and architecture level, and the language is just a side point, as it should be. That's why i want my language to get in the way as little as possible. C often gets in the way, due to its crude libraries. I find Java, Python, Perl, SQL, and Unix shell to be my languages of choice.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
We see companies who promise open source (as sun did for years) or open souce friendliness (as they still do) without actually changing anything in terms of licensing. This has happened to tons of projects, not just with Java. The fact is, listening to the Java Lobby claim something will be an open standard does not make it so. We have standards bodies and the OSI for a reason. Unless it is submitted to one of them or licensed with an OSI license, caveat emptor.
This comes as absolutly no suprise to me, and I actually don't have huge amounts of sympathy for Apache, after all, Sun appears to be well within their legal rights.
Despite the anti-microsoft zealots out there, Sun is not the knight in shining armor, but a company that has very cleverly exploited open souce development without being open source, and one which I am convinced would pull every closed source trick in the book in a hot minute if they thought it would benefit them.
It is staggering, the Apache group has been doing huge amounts of work to make Java a standard, ignoring the fact that the only J2EE Java standard comes from Sun.
I for one have steared clear of Java for precisely this reason, if it is not a standard there are some clear business reasons why you want to avoid it unless you like having the rug pulled out from under you periodically.
...the organization that created many projects and librarties that have become the de facto standards in the Web and software industry (Apache Web Server etc) WITHOUT any 'certification' is whinning that Sun won't give away free certifications to open source projects like JBoss?
/. and cause of many flames. Guarranteed to generate posts - especially from the C/C++/PERL/ groupies
/.'s favorite issues an excuse to rant and flame, and nothing else.
This is a tempest in a teapot.
The crew at JBoss don't seem to think the lack of certification is a big deal and they are in constant contact with Sun. I don't think that is the problem. I wonder what is really bothering Apache? I wish some one would post the REAL reason and not a misinformed link to "J2EE considered harmful" - if you check some of the more java focused sites, you can see that the person who started this rant at Apache doesn't know what they are talking about when it comes to J2EE (because, I suspect, the haven't used it).
My guess is that this is causing "contraversy" here because it is a great story involving:
1) Apache, everyone's favorite Open Source organization.
2) Sun - a corporate Behemoth out to make profits, that is not as bad as but in the same league as, MS.
3) Java - a favorite target here on
4) Because of 2) and 3) we also get a bunch of ".Net Vs Java" or "MS Vs Open Source" tangents generated, especially when people bring up the Mono project as an alternative to J2EE.
In other words, this story gives anybody on anyside of any of
There really isn't a story here. Let Apache and Sun solve their differences like adults without all this sensationalism.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha