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Sun's Simon Phipps Answers ESR On Java
comforteagle writes "Sun's Chief Technology Officer Simon Phipps has answered Eric Raymond's open letter calling on Sun to open source Java." In the quoted response, Phipps says (condensed) "I'd say this is 100 per cent rant... His simplistic accusations don't hold water... If this is the way that Open Source treats its friends, I'd hate to see how it treats its enemies... It's pretty difficult to respond to this. He's so out of touch."
The engine is already overbloated and lacks optimization. I've seen it take down a 3 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM just by running simple scripts. If this is what closed source gets us, I sure as hell don't want it.
This sig no verb.
I dunno, how about OpenOffice, NIS, NFS, and on and on and on...
Both NIS and NFS predate Linux, and I'm not sure how much help Sun provided in porting them to Linux. Furthermore, they're not particularly close to the heart of the Linux kernel; it could be claimed, quite reasonably, that IBM's contributions to the kernel carry much greater weight.
It's also worth mentioning that NFS is one of the biggest potential security holes in the UN*X world; some therefore regard it as a mixed blessing, preferring alternatives such as AFS or Coda.
Disclaimer: I'm not much of a fan of Sun, finding their products overpriced, underpowered and filled with bugs. The only thing I can say in their favour is their high-quality customer facing and support. So there you are.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Sun has to open source their JVM.
Oh, dear, I did it too, referring to the platform as the "JVM". No, it's not sufficient for them to open source their JVM; if they want to make Java an open platform, at this point, they would have to open source their entire JDK 1.5 implementation, without conditions or strings attached. But, for the reasons I already mentioned, I don't think a truly open Java is even desirable. Java should just get replaced instead.