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ESR's Open Letter to McNealy: Set Java Free!
yukster writes "Eric Raymond has posted an open letter to Sun Microsystem's Scott McNealy asking him to 'Let Java go.' He says Sun can 'have ubiquity or [it] can have control.' The excellent improvements made to Java in the upcoming 1.5 release help re-level the playing field with C#. But, it seems like if Sun really wants Java to rule the world, they should heed ESR's advice. Hey Mr. McNealy, listen to this guy... set Java free!"
Read the patch and weep
So what if Redhat's share price is higher than SUN's? Whose market cap is larger? Who has a higher revenue stream?, Yes, SUN.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cq?s=RHAT+SUNW&d=v1
SUN's is almost 6 times larger than RHAT in term of market cap and that means SUN is almost 6 times more valuable as a company that RHAT in term of dollars!
Just as IBM makes money on Linux, so can SUN, but then again, so what does that have to do with JAVA, necessarily?
Even his asshole doubles in pain for the shit he stuff in his mouth.
"But the casual equation between "open source" and "zero revenue" suggests that on another level you don't really know what you're talking about. Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun's when I just checked. Or ask IBM, which is using Linux as a lever to build a huge systems-integration business in markets like financial services that Sun has historically owned."
IBM has been much nicer with Eclipse. And You can now combine that, with GNU Classpath and IKVM.NET to bring you Java Eclipse on Mono .NET!. Be free to mix and match the best of two languages. With Free Software you are free to do what some coorporations would never want to happen. Even if it is the best for developers and users!
Amazing! And of course you can just use java as a as a normal language with GCC (gcj). We even have native eclipse! Super fast, no slow bytecode interpreter needed.
Go away Sun with you proprietary closed non-free java! We don't need you anymore.
Female Prison Rape in NY
'But the casual equation between "open source" and "zero revenue" suggests that on another level you don't really know what you're talking about. Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun's when I just checked.'
ESR's casual equation between "share price" and "value" suggests that he doesn't really know what he's talking about. Sun's market cap is 6 times Red Hat's!
But this is nitpicking. His larger point is good.
There are some issues with Sun's licensing for the Java JDK and JRE that make it difficult to include in a free software distribution. Debian has an informative Java FAQ that specifically outlines Java licensing concerns that make it impossible for them to include Java in the main distribution. This includes both items that Debian has philosophical issues with as well as more concrete terms that set strict limits on distributing Sun's Java products.
Basically, Sun makes it hard for free software & open source distributions to include Java, which makes it an additional hassle for the user to install and use. As a result, Java use in the open source community is probably much lower than it could be.
It would seem a bit difficult for ESR to have much credibility with McNealy after he trashed them in his "Sun is dead" article.
You are allowed to develop compilers on your own, for free. Youy are also allowed to develop your own JVM for free.
You are just not allowed to use Sun's code to do it.
Python and perl are common server-side languages, like Java. Javascript is not. Even in the shell, when is the last time someone wrote a command line utility in javascript?
Don't be so smug.
The problems with Java are not just the proprietary runtime but also the stagnating language itself.
As for gcj, it's a good compiler but with very incomplete libraries.
Even today, Mono is already far more useful for most kinds of programming. Sad, but true.
Out of interest, would you name some better IDEs..?
Anything with the Borland name before it. Just compare Visual C++ with Builder
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
What apps? Please name a significant one.
Tricky. I use JEdit, jDiskReport, and Tile Molester a lot (the last is a graphics editor for tile-based console systems), but I imagine you'd counter that none of those are "significant" applications. And you've already ruled out Eclipse, presumably on the grounds that it's incestuous.
How about this lot? Is there nothing significant among that lot?
If not, then please define significant.
".NET is no threat at all to Java. No one takes .NET seriously. Java has its niche"
.Net is rapidly gaining a foothold in the market and I think the numbers will tend to back me up on that.
.Net.
.Net based technologies as opposed to the existing Win32 model. In the next 5 years I seriously doubt that Windows will lose much of its 90% or so market share. This tells me that as opposed to "no one" taking .Net seriously the majority of developers and development companies are taking .Net very seriously. Perhaps when you say "no one" you really mean no one you know.
I curious as to what kind of facts and numbers you have to back that statement up. From my experience
There are about 2 million developers worldwide developing applications using Java. There are about 8 million developers world wide developing applications using Microsoft technologies with 40% (3.2 million) of those having made or making the transition to
App development on future versions of Windows will be primarily done using
webMethods and Tibco are two apps that come to mind (maybe because I work with them). These are major integration tools. Both server and client-side development pieces are in Java.
Antlr, sablecc: lexer and parser generators.
Jedit, Jext: code editors.
Eclipse, Netbeans, JBuilder: IDEs
Azureus: bittorrent client
jdbc: sql drivers for every database
Gantproyect: clone of ms project
report tools
sql frontends
jgraph: framework to write drawing applications.
Games
sshtools: ssh and ssh vnc client
For starters in souceforge.net there 11000+ projects in Java.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
This is totally incorrect.
You're allowed to read Sun's docs, specs, and even look at their code and still make your own implementation. Jikes is a free OSS java compiler that's better than Sun's compiler. Blackdown is a free OSS vm that's better than Sun's vm.
What you're not allowed to do is directly copy+paste Sun's stuff into your own product (free or not).
You are completely wrong. The only limitations are:
Anyone who wants to is free to implement a JVM using the specs. In fact there are a number of them. IBM has their own JVMs. There are also free compilers available (Jikes, GCJ).
.technomancer
All 112533 results for java :
Lets take a look at jobs son monster too
over 5000+ with java
2079 with .net
Lets look at jobs in California as a good indicator of the current state of .NET
1361 w/ the keyword java.
310 jobs with .NET
Now this is obviously not scientific, but it doesn't appear that java is hurting. In fact, it looks like if you wanted to improve your chances of employment, you're better off reading one of those java books.
Clarification: you are not allowed to use Sun's documentation / specifications either.
1000% incorrect. Every API and specification published by Sun regarding Java is open to anyone for re-implementation. Take JBoss, for example. The money comes into the picture when you want to make a Java-licensed product (name, logo, the whole banana) and sell it (e.g., BEA WebLogic).
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
You can tell Swing to use the native LNF (Look'N'Feel) and it will now look like GTK, XP, 2K, Mac
:-)
Yes, you can tell Swing. Trouble is: it won't listen
The only native L&F that is even half decent is the one on OS X (written by Apple). The others aren't even close. For starters, Swing doesn't even support native font rendering (meaning that fonts look different, and awful, and without Cleartype/Xft support).
ESR's comparison based on share price is clueless given that he's writing to a CEO.
IBM's JDK's are modified versions of Sun's JDK to run on Linux, AIX, and Windows.
IBM get's the latest JDK from Sun - minus Hotspot, then they:
1) Apply their performance improvements from previous IBM JDK's.
2) Port it to Linux, AIX, and Windows.
3) Brand it IBM's JDK.
4) Release the public version.
5) Add the IBM JCE/JSSE library, ORB, and some other proprietary IBM code.
6) Release it under the covers with WebSphere, DB2, WSAD, etc.
Also, IBM is banned by contract from running the modified JDK on Solaris.
In summary, IBM's JDK is Sun's JDK. There is no competing clean-room JDK out there I know of except Kaffe (and TowerJ?).
No in between version there are also a lot of improvements in the VM's put out by sun.
Java 1.0 was an interpreter, parsing and executing code as it happend.
Java 1.1 introduced the JIT which would compile pieces of code before execution and keep them cached in order to eliminate some overhead.
Java 1.2+ Introduces the hotspot which can do many things like unrolling loops, inlining code (and undoing this if new code is classloaded)
It can optimize code based on runtime statistics (IE if you execute this code X times, we must optimize it)
Soon we will also have escape analyses too.
Performance is improving
They bought it from Appeal
I'm not an economist, or a stockbroker. And yet, even I know the difference between share price and market capitalization.
Number of shares outstanding of RedHat (RHAT) stock: 1.7 million, according to their investor's FAQ.
Number of shares outstanding of Sun Microsystems (SUNW): 3.236 billion, according to their investor's FAQ.
Market capitalization of Red Hat, based on a stock price of $18.31 per share: about $31 million.
Market capitalization of Sun Microsystems, based on a stock price of $5.6 dollars per share: about $18.26 billion.
There are good business reasons for open sourcing Java, but saying, "One day, you may be as successful as a company with one-onethousandth of your total market value!" probably isn't the best way to convince them.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I had heard from a sun employee (~6 months ago) that Gosling wanted to make it open source, because he was doing a research project that nobody could help him on without being able to use the 1.5 compiler. Nevertheless it was getting held up in bureaucracy. But that should have cleared up 6mo ago, so that's a good reason to be posting this as Anonymous Coward.
Sorry, but I almost have to roll over laughing - you seriously think that C is more portable than Java???? Sure, most C projects you can compile on a lot of (Unix) platforms, but that is only because the developers went through a lot of hard working adapting compiler switches, making amends for the various libraries etc. If you think that's fun and it's how you want to spent your time, sure, go ahead. I guess those thousands of lines of makefiles can be written within a few mionutes, right?
Citing Internet Explorer applets that don't run in other browsers also just shows how little you know the subject. For your info: Microsoft has created it's own Java variant for IE, which of course isn't compatible with REAL Java. Don't blame Java for the stupidity of developers who fell for that ploy. And it's precisely why SUn doesn't want to make Java open - because that way they can sue competitiors who do such things, and at least try to keep Java compatible.
I'm using Java Cross platform all the time, ie I do my development on a WIndows machine, then deploy the Servlet on a Linux box - I have no problems at all with it. Frankly, I am not that concerned about my Linux box still running Java 1.1 code, either. Really, who cares - although I suspect it would actually work. True, sometimes there are incompatibilities across versions, but that's just what happens everywhere. Sometimes you just have to upgrade your stuff, such are our modern times.
If you jump through Suns hoops, you can indeed download the source for the JDK. It's not easy to build it, but it can be done (I've had it running some versions ago). It is just not under an open license, so you can't really do much with it, except build it and run it.