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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!"
...would you give away the only technology that might possibly save your company from bankrupcy?
...but not both. Good point. Except that Microsoft seemed to have managed both with Windows, Office, etc.
SUN knows exactly what cards they hold in their deck. While the letter does point out that SUN has much to gain, it is filled with nothing more than well wishing and potential profits. SUN already owns the source, and it will take more than a "if we work togeather as friends" to get them to assist in the continued expansion of the Open Source community.
The cards are all in their deck. Open Source needs to provide something more profitable than a "cant we all get along" letter.
Money talks...
My Thoughts, Kyndig
Java is already more ubiquitious than C# -- so what would Sun stand to gain from setting it free? For all intents and purposes, it's as free as I need it to be. I have full access to the Sun's source code for the JVM and the Java classes. I can use it the JVM for free in commercial applications. I have many different virtual machine implementations to choose from, on a wide variety of platforms. I'm afraid that setting Java "free" is going to lead to future revisions of the language being designed by committee -- we don't need another C++ thank you very much.
Sun needs its tight control over Java in order to, well, tightly control it. Remember what happened when Microsoft tried to "embrace and extend" Java with Windows extentions, Sun was able to kick Microsoft completely out of the Java business.
Open Source would allow Microsoft to create WinJava so long as they released the source, which might not be that hard of a thing to do. I don't think Sun wants to go there...
The point of writing an open letter is usually to communicate to the masses, not the person named... making an offer the person named is likely to refuse for the sake of pointing out the refusal.
In this case, Raymond's pointing out that Sun likes to be friendly to the open source community, but they'll never release their crown jewel.
The Sun SDK comes with sources to the standard API classes, there are alternative opensource virtual machines and compilers available for Java and changes to the environment are made via the community process.
What is it that is being ask of Sun here?
Even in GPL style open source development there is a central core of people who decide which patches make it into the product and which dont.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with the way Sun are managing Java as long as it remains freely available.
As for 1.5 helping to 'level the playing field' with C#, I dont think suitable credit is being given here. Java is ahead of C# in the vast majority of ways that count. All C# has done is formalize well know design patterns into syntax (delegates vs observer pattern). This is not worthy of accolade.
Make no mistake, it is Microsoft that is playing the catch-up game!
Sun is not in a position to make things free for strategic reasons. Their mandate is that every project within Sun must make money. Period. And yes, I know this will sink the company eventually. They are stuck in a short-term profit mentality and there is little we can do about it.
The Open Source implementations of Java are coming along well, and could catch up with a little help.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
He never needed a point before.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Okay, ESR is writing an open letter to a CEO of Sun. Why the *hell* is he comparing Red Hat and Sun by *share price*? Share price means effectively nothing when comparing company worth -- market capitalization is what should be looked at, as it takes into account the number of shares. RHAT's market cap is impressive, but it's still 1/6th Sun's, not the three times Sun's value that ESR implies when comparing share prices.
So, there are two possibilities that I see here.
A) ESR is unaware of the difference between share price and market cap. This seems a pretty awful knowledge hole. If he doesn't know, he just made himself look pretty dumb in front of some major business folks while advising them on business strategy. It's pretty embarrassing to consider that ESR can't even have had a savvy person read over his letters before he tries to speak for the open source community.
B) ESR knows what the difference is, and is hoping that "three times" sounds better. Since there is no *way* that ESR can fool a CEO into blindly going along with him (if there's one thing a CEO of a publically traded company knows, it's stock value), he must be putting this in the letter for the masses of people that are completely unversed in market economics, which pretty means *maybe* some high school and below kids. This is nothing more than a propaganda job. I'd view this as extremely disappointing, coming from someone who I consider capable of putting out good, straight arguments about open source. Propaganda does not work well on online forums. A few people inevitably punch holes in it, other folks spread the problems, and your argument is left without any meat. It happens to Microsoft all the time.
Either way, it's a disturbingly unprofessional job. It reads like some of the worse "I just sent this in to the company" Slashdot posts. For someone who is concerned about the business credibility of open source, ESR sure as hell isn't holding up his end of things.
He compares, in an incredibly simplified manner, three projects that Sun has done (throwing out all but one factor -- whether they were open source), and then claims that Sun should free Java. That's absurd. Sun execs will have gone over this in far more detail many times before, and the only thing this does is ensure that ESR emails go in the wastebasket. The fact that this letter is open makes it doubly embarassing.
I have deep respect for the work that ESR has done, and I like his famous study "The Cathedral and the Bazar". However, I really wish he'd refrain from writing open letters, or at *least* show them to a couple of people before blasting them off.
May we never see th
...but in a different way.
We all know that Java has its perceived flaws and many people say that, whilst Java is good, if they were doing it again, they would not go the same route.
So what I ask is - why not design an open source Java type language and libraries for the next decade, and start from basics all over again?
Like many people on Slashdot, I don't believe absolutely everything must be free in the fullest sense of the word. Companies have a right to keep their products as closed if they wish to. If we truly believe open source is better then we should design a new Java equivalent from beginning to end.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I'm too lazy to look, but this isn't the first time slashdot has covered some yahoo with a grudge blasting Sun over not releasing Java to the public domain or whatever.
I consider myself a "Java Developer" by profession. I switched years ago and have avoided C++ ever since. I love Java because it ISN'T C++.
And I can't help but feel that Sun's control over Java is what has kept it from degenerating into a mess like C++.
As another poster has mentioned, everything you want to know about Java's internals and source code is there for anyone who wants to look.
About the only thing you can't do is break standard's compliance and still claim to be Java and thank god for that. If Java was not under Sun's control then there would have been no recourse against MicroSoft for pulling that stunt.
How many companies have been taken to task for claiming to have a C, C++, Pascal, Fortran, Cobol - you name it compiler that wasn't standards compliant? When's the last time you wrote a non-trivial program using VisualC++ that compiled and ran out of the box on Linux EVEN with strict standards compliance turned on? Yeah, a lot of it's library issues and not language itself, but with Java everyone has access to the same rich library, and with few exception, most third party libraries are fully cross-platform as well (at least if they claim %100 pure Java).
Thank god for Java and thank god for Sun's control over it. The JSR is enough openess we need.
Part of the problem is its cross-platform nature. As a user of more than one minority platform, I see this as being a massive advantage. However, I know that people who only use Windows (and some who only use Linux) see it merely as a speed penalty; should those people have the right to fragment the platform, making it a little better for the majority, but much much worse -- or even impossible -- for the rest? Is 'majority rule' such a good thing in this case?
If Java had been completely free in its early days, I think there's little doubt that, er, a certain company would have embraced and extended it in their traditional fashion, turning it into a de facto Windows language. Sun's strong control early on was necessary to prevent this. They've slowly relaxed their control, though; the Java Community Process lets anyone propose improvements, and many of the current ones have come from outside Sun. And the platform has always been open in the sense that anyone can make a clean-room implementation of the spec and call it Java if it passes the compatibility tests.
The question, I think, is just how much control they still need to have. Too much, and people will worry about their motives and Java's future; OTOH, too little, and maybe even now the platform will fragment, making it far less useful to developers, and possibly leaving room for a less altruistic company to take control of it? A similar question is how fast should the platform change -- too slow, and it risks losing out to more modern ones that have whizz-bang features; too fast, and it risks losing developers who don't want to keep relearning or rewriting.
So, while I generally agree with open-source principles, I think Sun has generally done the right thing for Java so far. But how much control do they still need? I don't know. Does anyone?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I think ESR doesn't understand that there could be open-source implmentations of Java if only he wanted one (in fact, there are). The Java specs are public, and anyone can implement against them if they feel like it. In fact, this whole thing can be thrown back to ESR -- he has said that open source projects come into existence because someone somewhere needs to "scratch an itch". So if Eric has an itch, he's free to start scratching.
Maybe he's talking about opening up the specs, but what would that mean exactly? There's good reason to say that it's happened already. Sun flirted with the idea of turning the specs over to a standards body some years ago, but it soon became clear that Microsoft would try to influence any such organization and bastardize the language. Remember, cross-platform portability is one of the highest-priority features of Java, the main reason it's interesting at all for Sun and many other players, but it's precisely what Microsoft most urgently would try to destroy. About the same time, Microsoft created a version of the JVM shot through with Windows dependencies and lacking some libraries they were required to implement, all in violation of the license, for which they were duly bitch-slapped by the courts (a set of facts that many Slashdotters curiously like to overlook). Sun learned the hard way that they couldn't go along with any standards process that could endanger cross-platform portability.
So now there is the Java Community Process, over which Sun has only limited control, and in which organizations such as the Apache Group participate. Arguably, this is at least as open as the standards processes for many open-source projects. Anyone can access the code to Apache software and the Linux kernel, for example, but only voting members of the Apache Group decide what goes into and out of Apache software, and essentially Linus and his lieutenants decide what goes into Linux. The JCP has its faults, but being strictly proprietary or less open than most of the open-source projects are not among them.
Finally, I'd like to know the grounds for ESR's claim that Sun's alleged control of Java is "throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl." Java has one of the largest development communities in the world with lively activity among open-source developers -- think of Jakarta. And although Perl and Python developers tend to disintegrate into a blue rage when somebody says this, Java is the language of choice for a wide range of industry projects, including the most business-critical applications, and Perl and Python certainly are not. (Flame away if you like, flail against the windmills, rage impotently against the stubborn truth.) I think ESR's insinuation of a dim future for Java due to the displeasure of open source developers is just blowing smoke.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Hmm... Lets see....
Sun creates Java, releases it for almost all platforms. Then, they maintain it and allow other companies to produce products to sell and run with their standards for free(just look how many J2EE servers there are out there).
Then, Sun goes a step further by creating a developer's network and allowing other developer networks to arise to further the advancement of java based products.
On the otherside, Microsoft creats C#, sells it for a hell of a lot of money, and says it can only run on these platforms and by the way, all your previous VB stuff, throw it out, we don't care.
Who cares if Sun wants to keep the source code, they have done a great job with Java and I only see good things in the future. Just because something isn't open source doesn't mean its not good. I love open source but some people in that world need to get over themselves and thank the companies (like Sun) that work so hard to provide us with tools. Where would organizations like the Jakarta organization be if Sun had not helped them so much.
Kudos to Sun!
I have never got along with the whole object-oriented thing anyway -- I'd rather tell the computer how to process the data, than tell the data how to let the computer process it. Assembly language will always be free, of course; but not everybody thinks in the same way, and learning a programming language can be as big a job as actually writing a programme in it.
Java really is as close as it gets to open source without being open source -- and it still isn't close enough. There is also the question of whether Java would have matured so well without someone keeping a tight rein over it. Sometimes you have to protect your little ones while they are growing -- but you have to realise that the thing about children is that they eventually grow up and learn to live without you. Sun once has a lot to lose by opening the Java source, but today it has far less to lose in doing so. There soon will be "clean" Java interpreters that contain no Sun code anyway, and the choice for Sun will be whether to free up Java or break it.
But there is always the option of multiple-licencing. Sun's licence restrictions -- particularly the bit about not distributing competing products -- are there deliberately to keep Microsoft from spoiling Java. What if some Linux vendor were to negotiate a separate licence from Sun, permitting them to distribute Sun's Java interpreter ready-to-go with OpenOffice.org and their Web browser?
Their distribution probably would be "tainted" and not freely redistributable in its entirety {thus introducing logistical difficulties, but not insurmountable ones}; but at least it would give Sun a toe in the waters of open source.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You don't seem to understand Open Source. This *will* save Sun from bankruptcy. By making Java Open Source, Sun will gain a huge number of developers who will work on it for free. ...yup, that trick ALWAYS works! Just like it did for Netscape! And Ximian! And Eazel!
You appear to have confused "open source" with "magic fairy dust". I hate to be the one to break this to you, but it doesn't work that way.
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