Sun and Eclipse Squabble

gbjbaanb writes "CNET news is reporting on a potential spat between Sun and Eclipse: 'Sun Microsystems has sent a letter to members of Eclipse, urging the increasingly influential open-source project to unify rather than fragment the Java-based development tool market.' Although Sun's letter says it wants interoperability, and a 'broad base' for java tools, it then insists Eclipse should push to be a 'unifying force for Java technology'. Competing tools is a good thing, but it sounds like Sun just wants everything to work its way."

Comments

Re:A lesson from Microsoft

[AKAImBatman]

You don't know what you're talking about. Sun gives away Forte for Java under an Open Source branding (think Mozilla/Netscape). The real reasons for this squabble go back to '01 when IBM released Eclipse after inviting every company except Sun to join the project. At the time, Netbeans/Forte was very mature and would have been a good choice for IBM to build their own platform off of. Instead, they named their product as a way of snubbing Sun, and used their own proprietary GUI API so the two projects could never interoperate.

Eclipse invited Sun...

[The boojum]

I find this interesting, considering that, not too long ago, the Eclipse consortium offered to join with Sun (and even change to a less threatening name if need be). Sun however, turned them down.

Personally, I like the direction that Eclipse is going. I tried Forte once and it just didn't feel right. Eclipse however, has been fantastic since I found it and started using it as my work IDE. (My whole project team adopted it as well.) It has made coding Java a pleasure as no other IDE (in any language) has, and has led to me using Java as a development language for personal projects where I otherwise would have used C or C++. I've largely given over using XEmacs for coding Java. I'm also impressed by the speed of the Eclipse development cycle with new milestones coming out approximately every month. I always get this kid-in-the-candy-shop feeling checking out the New and Noteworthy page with each new milestone.

Re:Java...

[Mysteray]

Gnuman99:

Maybe if Sun actually released the source to Java under a free license, maybe, just maybe, people might improve it and use it.

Khakionion:

After all, they want to force people into their way of thinking now, why would they accept any changes to Java that someone made that didn't mesh with Sun's current plan for the growth of Java?

They wouldn't have to accept any changes they didn't like. They could still enforce exactly what they wanted with the Java trademark. They could put the source in the public domain with the simple stipulation that non-strictly-compliant implementations couldn't be called Java(tm).

Not having it free software certainly didn't slow Microsoft down one bit from extending it without their approval. In fact, the result was a freshly-designed competitor (C#/.Net).

They don't even seem to be making a profit on the language itself, why this obsessive desire to control it with an iron fist?

As for the people-might-use-it question, it would certainly make all the difference to this developer. I know there are free Java implementations, but until I see a solid crossplatform GUI kit, I'll probably continue to look elsewhere.

A Company of Dilberts

[Greyfox]

I'm beginning to think that Sun's a company of very bright engineering types. Dilbert would only assume that the way he says is doing something is The Right Way. Now imagine if the company was full of Dilberts with not enough PHBs to keep them all in check. I think that's kind of the situation we have with them. They can't understand why everyone else can't see the genius of their solutions. It's just the engineer-with-the-perfect-solution mentality. We all get like that sometimes.