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MS Moves Deliberately On Java Ruling
Darwin X writes "So, Microsoft will finally put Sun's JRE into future versions of Windows. This article talks about how they're taking the steps to make this happen. The fun part of it is that Microsoft has released a statement that said Windows Customers are NOT required to update their machines with this. Ah, yes...gotta keep it all MS in the house..." Update: 02/03 23:07 GMT by T : However, according to this report on News.com, Microsoft has may be able to backtrack anyhow -- they've gotten a stay from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, meaning the earlier order to ship Java with Windows doesn't apply, for now.
Removing their own java isn't the same as installing Sun's. Just stalling for time... "Yeah, it'll be in the 'next one'". Couldn't fit it into this one? Run out of disk space or something? Ba.
-=sig=-
Microsoft also says:
They don't have a monopoly.
They don't have security problems, only lazy customers.
They don't think you should worry about giving them your information.
They don't think 95, 98, 2000, or XP is proprietary.
And the grand daddy of them all, they don't think you need anything but automatic update to keep your system secure.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Sounds to me like they are making all of this complicated planning (I had to read the article a few times to get what they're doing).
With all of the SP1a, SP1b, SP2 and other crap relating to other versions of windows, users may be forced upon with a few hundred MB of downloads (depending on how they get their patches).
Sun: You've licensed Java; you can distribute it, but you can't modify it.
Microsoft: Yes, we can; we're Microsoft.
Judge: Now you have to distribute it.
Microsoft: No, we don't; we're Microsoft.
Microsoft's "move" is to today replace Windows XP Service Pack 1 with a version without a JVM, and in June to also offer a version of the service pack with Sun's JVM. So far as I can tell, even in June, XP users who've already installed the service pack won't be able to get Sun's JVM from Microsoft, unless they re-install SP1 using the new version (if they're even able to do so).
Windows Server 2003, formerly Windows XP Server, is (according to Microsoft) "not impacted by the District Court's order and will include neither the Microsoft Virtual Machine nor Sun's JRE."
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Just out of curiosity ... /. has a special category for Java, with a nice coffee cup icon (how clever). But why none for C#?
Being a wiseass (anonymously) but noting the editorial influence shaping things.
Anyway, this should *really* be a "the courts" or Microsoft story.
1. this court system is totally foobar, ie. it no longer functions as intended, due to major "holes"
2. this court system is horribly corrupt
It all must come down to campaign contributions and conflicts of interest.
Government by and for the people? *laughs* - whatever. By the politicians for their own interests is more accurate.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Lots of reasons I want .NET to fail and fail badly
.NET "rebuttal" that I linked to above, "For non-profit use VS.NET can be had pretty cheaply, especially if you know anyone that is in college somewhere." Pretty cheaply? For a non-profit (that means charities, churches, universities, the hobbiest who is going to give away his work for FREE)... pretty cheaply? Wow. That is well and truly pathetic. To try and justify it, and say, oh well, you can try to scam an educational discount so it won't be so dear, is even more pathetic.
.NET commercials with William H. Gacy telling you how great it is without really ever telling you anything about it? Microsoft doesn't trust .NET to stand on its own technical merits and it knows it may go like cod-liver oil down the gullets of a lot of people who have seen how the company works behind closed doors even if it were the tech shiznit.
.NET just in case there wasn't any grassroots community who actually wanted to do it. Or maybe just in case there was and they couldn't control it.
.NET for other platforms? If those same people were working on giving us new libraries and new tools for an already existing language instead of pouring in the thousands of man hours it's going to take to build a copy of the C# compiler or a .NET version of Ant and JUnit?
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It's benefits a criminal organization. Not one that's been found guilty of crimes once or maybe twice, but lots and lots of times. Those crimes are many and varied, but here's just a few of them: Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, DOJ v. Microsoft, Sun v. Microsoft.
P.S. If you want to split hairs, Stac v. Microsoft isn't a criminal action, it's doesn't stem from a criminal abuse of their monopoly like the other two cases. Instead it was just a case of a small company being driven out of business by willful patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, etc.
Microsoft isn't just one thing anymore. It's too damn big for that. I'm sure even Bill himself knows better than to think that he truly controls the whole ship because it's become big enough that he can't possibly know all the projects, people, etc. anymore. But even a really large company still has a kind of collective personality that it exudes and a large part of the personality both internal and external to Microsoft for many years now is that of a total control freak.
If they don't own it, if they don't control it, if they didn't create it, if it doesn't have a broad stamp from Microsoft on it, then they don't want it. Sometimes it's sufficient for the thing to merely exist and they'll refuse to acknowledge it, other times they need to actively stamp it out because they can't control it.
When was the last time you can remember Microsoft saying they supported a standard? That is, not something they invented and submitted a RFC for, an actual, take it off the shelf and re-implement it without renaming it or "improving" it so it doesn't work with anybody else standard. C++? Basic? HTML? A video or audio codec? Java? Anything?
I'm sure there's something, somebody will point out their excellent support for TCP/IP or something and I'm sure that's true. But if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person.
When your business is selling the operating systems that 90+% of everybody uses, software development tools should not be a profit center.
Why should I have to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a "universal subscription" in order to have access to compilers and basic development information? Sun doesn't have to do that? On this point I'll quote from the
Marketing. Have you been "lucky" enough to catch one of the
So they are going to pull a page out of Intel's bum-bum-buh-bum "Intel Inside" playbook and try to sell the brand like it's sneakers and cola. Trust us, you'll look cool if you use it, and we'll keep hammering the brand on TV so somebody who doesn't have much tech savvy in your organization will ask you if you are using it, or have plans to port to it, or whatever, even if he hasn't got a clue what "it" is in this case.
They don't trust you. They don't like what they can't control and they can't control you. They can try and they always will keep trying but ultimately you are going to see them keep trying to do things and always keep a step towards the door just so they can bolt if they have to. Want to see what I mean? Go visit GotDotNet sometime if you haven't already been there. It's the grassroots community website that Microsoft put up to support
Ever been to SourceForge? Of course you have, everybody has because that's one of the hubs of all open source projects. You can go there and get the source of thousands of cool open source projects and it really serves the community well. There's even hundreds of projects now that list C# among their programming languages. So why did Microsoft feel compelled to create their own GotDotNet Workspaces that is clearly just a ripoff of SourceForge?
A few reasons are fairly clear: First, at many of their workspaces you don't get in unless they know who you are. Ever been stopped at SourceForge and asked for a name and password to look at a project? What about download binaries or source? No? At GotDotNet you will, lots of projects are marked with a lock. Second, forget about all those messy licenses that Microsoft might not approve of, you don't need to worry your little head about BSD vs. GPL vs. LGPL. You've got the one true workspace license that you have to agree to, or else you won't be putting your project there. Lastly, well it's kind of obvious, but it's really all about control isn't it. After all, if you aren't under their thumb, that has to be a bad thing. So a SourceForge that they control is pretty much a requirement, isn't it?
It's a really sad way for a lot of people to waste a whole lot of time rebuilding that which already exists. Wouldn't the whole computing world be a lot better if there wasn't a team of people, maybe a couple of teams of people building complete copies of
In the end, we'll all just be left with another way to do the exact same thing only in a different language. Lord knows the world benefits now from being unable to share media between France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan because we can't all speak the same language. I benefit every day from the fact that I can't read a Japanese manga I might enjoy or understand a TV show from Europe. Once you are done building this tower, go build a few more right beside it using Perl, Python, and Ruby too. They're all trailing behind in certain areas, we need to make sure the same set of stuff is reinvented and rewritten for all of them too.
I'm tired now and I'm sure I can probably come up with some more stuff to add to rant but it's not really going to change anything anyway.
taken from: http://www.johnmunsch.com/archives/2003_01.jsp#00
Sun took over iPlanet. It is called Sun ONE now. Netscape(AOL) now has no part in it. The webserver is a pile of crap now. They went from 4.1 to 6.0, skipping 5, just like Netscape did with its browser. Last week I tryed to get a servlet to work in. Took me 6 hours and I just gave up. Installed Tomcat and had servlets running in 10 minutes. So now we have the iPlanet front end with the nsapi_redirect.dll pushing the servlet requests onto Tomcat. Damn what a mess.
just opinion
I don't see where forcing Microsoft to include Sun's VM provides any benefit to the majority of Windows users. I can see where it benefits open-source developers, and where it definitely benefits Sun. But client-side Java apps are on the wane on the Windows platform and this merely adds to the bloat.
Perhaps both VMs should be removed and only be installed at the users option, if it's necessary for software to function, but otherwise, it's useless.
So, who benefits? This decision should have been about what's best for users, not Sun or Microsoft. There are other ways to punish MS for failing to live up to a written contract.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Ok, let's take a principled stand.
Instead of complaining about Microsoft, let's just not do any development for the M$ platform. We've got Linux and Java and we can develop using those.
M$ doesn't owe us a living (nor have they offered to provide one for us). No one is forcing us to develop on their platform, and if they try, we can just say no. Might cut into our paychecks? Well no one said living according to principles is cheap. Just seems more productive than constantly bi-otching and moaning about them.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. -- Aldous Huxley
I just got the March edition of CPU and Alex St. John, a columnist for CPU and "...one of the founding creators of Microsoft's DirectX technology" complained that his company's (WildTangent) browser plugin allowing Java developers to create DirectX games. They originally developed it for both Sun and Microsoft Java, but decided to go totally with Microsoft because of size (M$ Java: 3MB vs. Sun Java: 7MB), stability, and ease of extension concerns. He said that Microsoft added extentions that made it easier for developers. So, he complains that his plugin must be re-ported to Sun Java. Personally, I think that he is complaining about what Java was originally intended to be: an OS independant way to create programs. It is understandable that he made a mistake and chose the wrong Java, but to complain about his company losing money when technology is kept standardized is rediculous.