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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."
If this is the way that Open Source treats its friends, I'd hate to see how it treats its enemies...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Shame I can't see the article - /.ed already!
An open letter from RMS to clarify the situation and convince Mr. Phipps that the free software community loves him and that the open source community does not accurately represent our opinions.
I used to want Sun to open source Java, but they've actually been a pretty good steward and I quite like what they're doing with it. The Java Community Process seems to be working.
So is the website...
ah, the old ad hominem attack.
Is that all they're teaching folks in MBA school anymore? Don't respond to valid arguments and criticism; instead, discredit your detractors by branding them as "out of touch" or "communist" or a "tree hugger".
I find it incredibly discouraging to know that everything I need to know about running a global billion dollar software company, I learned on the playground in kindergarten.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If this is the way that Open Source treats its friends...
For the eleventh time: neither Eric nor any other single institution represents Open Source! This is the way Eric S. Raymond treats people, nothing more, nothing less.
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"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
Warning:Simon Phipps has made an illegal operation. The application will be terminated.
sulli
RTFJ.
*Languages* are free in the sense that it's pretty hard to program in a language that won't tell you about it's syntax, keywords or structure.
I think you meant *compiler* but even then, because gcc is open source and borlands free compiler isn't, does that mean C++ is a bad language? Does it mean gcc is better than bcc? Or does it mean that it doesn't make a difference?
I don't follow your logic there.
So should the world judge all proprietary software vendors by SCOs activities - that position seems a rather simplistic rant and doesn't hold water.
If we are supposed to differentiate bewteen SCO and SUN (hard to do with names that share such commonality) can he not do us the favour of tarring a whole community with one broad brush.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
Why exactly does this man think he's the Voice of the open source movement? I'm an active contributor to three projects, and he doesn't have the respect of any of my friends and fellow coders from those projects - and his book is based on a flawed assumption and is far from enlightening (no, they did not build cathedrals that way).
If this is the way that Open Source treats its friends, I'd hate to see how it treats its enemies..
Since when is Sun a friend of open source? They may be more "open sourcey" than, say, Microsoft, but I wouldn't call them friends. Maybe temporary allies.
It's like IBM. I'm glad they're running pro-Linux ads. It's helpful. It's nice to see corporate support. But remember when IBM was the "bad guy?"
My question is: what is a "friend" of open source? The GNU project is a friend of open source. Eric Raymond is a friend of open source (if an embarrassing one at times like these). Until I see more proof, I'm hesitant to call Sun any more a friend of Open Source than Microsoft a friend of IBM in the 80s.
Bottom line: Raymond was off the cuff and out of line. He was (and rightly so) called for it. But I'll wait until I see more "friendship" from Sun before I jump ship.
(And let the karma burn begin.)
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Sun fires back over Open Source Java accusations
[PC Pro] 15:13
Sun has offered a frank response to the open letter from Eric S, Raymond, President, Open Source Initiative, in which he called on Sun to make its Java platform Open Source and described the company's Open Source strategy as 'spotty' and 'confused'.
'I'd say this is 100 per cent rant,' Sun's Chief Technology Evangelist, Simon Phipps told us. '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.'
Raymond's first line of attack was to dispute whether CEO Scott McNealy's claim that 'the open-source model is our friend,' has any substance when at the same time Sun is filling the coffers of Linux litigator SCO through licensing deals and still keeps Java under 'tight control'.
'It's pretty difficult to respond to this. He's so out of touch,' said Phipps. 'To even begin one must first address the error in his world view: He has taken quotes given by Scott McNealy to analysts and attacked them as if they were spoken to the Open Source community.
'In fact, Sun has contributed more to Open Source than anybody else bar Berkeley [University of California]. We understand Open Source better than anyone else. IBM is just wrapping itself in the flag, but it still behaves like an old-fashioned systems company. Sun is actually taking the risks. [Raymond] isn't well informed and is ignoring most of the stuff that Sun is doing. He completely ignores things like the Java Desktop, the Java Enterprise System running on Linux in its new servers. He's very selective about what he wants to write about.
For the record, Raymond wrote: 'Sun's insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged Sun's long-term interests by 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.'
Phipps responded that Java is not a scripting language, so it is meaningless to make such a comparison.
Raymond also wrote in his open letter: 'Sun's terms are so restrictive that Linux distributions cannot even include Java binaries for use as a browser plugin, let alone as a standalone development tool.' But Phipps responds that SUSE has managed to do so without any problems.
Raymond also says that Sun faces the stark choice of control or ubiquity for Java. Phipps said: 'Java is already everywhere.'
And as for control, Phipps maintains: 'Sun has no more control over Java than anyone else in the Java Community Process'. Besides, he said that since version 2.5 of the Java Development Process that was ratified some 18 months ago it has been possible for anyone to create an implementation of Java that complies with the Open Source requirements. And that includes Java 1.5 which will be out 'really soon' [an alpha was released two weeks ago].
'We don't have an axe to grind with Eric, and we don't have any hostility to what he is supporting. But I don't believe there are any barriers to making Java Open Source,' he said.
'The question he should really be asking is why has no-one else offered to create an Open Source version of Java. Maybe because it's on the 'too hard' list. Sun would support an Open Source version of Java, but it need a lot of money and time to do so. You can't just flick a switch. Right now Sun has higher priorities in the form of Java 1.5,' he said.
Questions of who makes Java Open Source aside, there is a strong demand that it be implemented. When we interviewed Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, last month we asked what the most pressing needs are for the GNU operating system (of which Linux is the kernel), he said: 'We need a free complete Java platform.'
Matt Whipp
Ok, this time Sun is Ev!L because is not open sourcing a product they own..
Dude, asking a little more is good, asking too much is instantly very bad... companies who like the open source model would easily scare if a preacher starts asking them to open source every product they own.
I still don't see the point of a open source java...sorry, you can write open source code for it...that's good for me.
Jonathan Schwartz came to the Utah Java Users Group in January (We got him out here with free tickets to the Sundance Film Festival.). He asked if people felt that Java should be open sourced. About half the audience raised their hands, myself included.
He said that it wouldn't happen because Sun didn't want to see multiple versions of Java out there. If MS went and changed some things in Sun's Java and then started to bundle their version of Java with Windows, who knows what will happen.
We will start to see different versions of Java. People will start to think that the MS version of Java is the actual "real" Java and get mad when someone writes a Java program using Sun's version of Java.
Then, MS will be able to start to dictate what goes in Java, or they will just stop following Sun's vison of Java and go on their own merry way.
He gave more reasons and it convinced me that it really wasn't that great of an idea to open source Java.
IBM is just wrapping itself in the flag, but it still behaves like an old-fashioned systems company. Sun is actually taking the risks
Of course, it all suddenly becomes clear! Sun are taking all the risks, by investing so much time and effort in Linux development. That's why SCO are suing them, rather than those Johnny-come-latelys at IBM.
Wait a moment....
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
What is the problem? There is already implementations of Java that are OpenSource. All the specs are open, and allow for this.
Just because Sun doesn't want to open up their code itself doesn't mean that Java can't be open source.
Mono/C# are interesting, but I want to see C# in a couple years when Microsoft is looking for more ways to make money. All it will take is a little twist and Mono/C# will be a different implementation of C# than MS version. At that point, which one would be "Correct".
Microsoft tried this with Java. They failed because Java is held by Sun. Multiple OS's are what Sun wants for Java. They could have made a Java that ONLY worked on Solaris, but they didn't.
Again, I ask, what is the problem?
P.S. I am not a Sun Employee, I am an Open Source volunteer for OpenOffice.org.
Scott Carr
ah, the old ad hominem attack.
Is that all they're teaching folks in MBA school anymore? Don't respond to valid arguments and criticism; instead, discredit your detractors by branding them as "out of touch" or "communist" or a "tree hugger".
It's actually a good response in situations where any response would be the wrong one. Sun could try to explain their reasoning, tell everyone about the SCSL, show all the contributions to Open Source they've made, and they'd still get skewered. At least this way, they have a fighting chance. Quite a few people agree with Sun's position and disagree with ESR. By using the ad hominem response, they're bolstering the opinions of those people and making their voices louder. Any other tack would have made their supporter's voices that much quieter.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
OK, you're right. He's pretty useless. At least he likes Jaegermeister, I hear.
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And people wonder why slashdot posters never read the article before posting. We try; we want to; but we kill the poor article host.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on Slashdot.
I'd explain it to you, but there's no way an out of touch communist tree hugger such as yourself would understand.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The language specification should be open. This should include the specification of conformance tests. Otherwise we end up with many dialects that are not completely interoperable.
On the other hand, I don't think matters either way if any particular language's implementation is open-sourced. You shouldn't need to see Sun's source code in order to write a fully-compliant Java compiler/interpreter/runtime. Just like you don't need to see AT&T's (or Microsoft's or Borland's or anyone else's) C-compiler sources in order to develop a compiler that fully complies with the ISO standard. Having those sources would make it easier to port the language to a new platform, but they should never be necessary. If they are necessary, then the language specification isn't specific enough.
Mind you, I would love to be able to see Sun's sources as much as the next guy, but I really fail to see how their choice to keep their code proprietary in any way lessens the value of the language itself.
Yes. He's one of those helpful fairies that most open source programmers don't really believe in, but who sometimes sneak into their workshops at night to finish cobbling their shoes. These mythical creatures are sometimes called "documenters."
ESCAPE POD - The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine
The following quotes of his just make him sound unprofessional and mannerless more than anything else:
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.
This was totally uncalled for, I can think of a million better ways to phrase it.
Matters aren't helped by the fact that Sun appears, with Microsoft, to be one of the two companies doing most to stuff SCO's war chest for its attack on Linux.
I don't see any concrete proof that Sun is *indeed* behind the fiaSCO. You don't go about making false/unfounded accusations against people, just because you read it on Slashdot.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
For J2SE part of the Spec is shared code so controlled by Sun. Also the spec is controlled by Sun and so are the test. They have not clearly stated that they would not attack a clean room effort. So in general your statement is not corrent. The JVM spec is open except for a patent held by Sun on what are called quick opcodes Sun does not say what they would do to someone who implemented them. So there are enough minefields in this to make creation of a open source java a careful endevour. This is why Gnu Classpath is following a strict clean room approach to development. Which does slow the process quite a bit.
'In fact, Sun has contributed more to Open Source than anybody else bar Berkeley.'
I think he's right there. The high performance and ease of use of Sun's C Compiler did more to promote GCC than anything those GNU folks ever did. Their tireless efforts to provide an unusable toolkit and utilities throughout the lifecycle of SunOS and Solaris only proves their support for open source alternatives.
It's actually a good response in situations where any response would be the wrong one.
No, at most, he should have simply said "we have a fundamental disagreement in our philosophies" and left it at that.
Insulting people who criticize you is never a "good" response.
I have just returned from Sun's two day Tech. Day in London. They were keen to push that they were working closely with Open Source. They pointed out that they were doing things such as JDS (Sun's Linux distro for the desktop - it's pretty much just Suse atm), NetBeans (an open source IDE they support and use within Sun One Studio) and so forth.
Now you can't deny they are using Open Source, but I was finding hard to see how they were contributing. Here are some ideas:
(1.) Increased awareness - nah: they are FUDing things as their own work
(2.) Contributing IP - I can't find demonstrable, significant Sun IP that has been changed to be licensed on an OSS approved license (I maybe wrong).
(3.) Giving Java to the community - noooo, you can't even distribute the Sun JVM or JDK with a linux distro.
I think Sun want to do the right thing - I think they think they are doing the right thing - they clearly have a way to go.
Here's an example.
JSF (Java Server Faces)
This is a MVC based framework used in presentation tiers in Java (mostly web based).
Now what Sun did was hire the project lead from Jakarta's Structs to write the spec and an implementation of JSF.
JSF is a direct competitor to Structs! If a Jakarta was a company this would be an incredible agressive tactic. Hire the project lead and get him/her to develop a new more featureful version of his old product.
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Absolutely correct! With the recent mobile java win in China, Sun needs to recognize that perception is 90% of the battle, ad I would agree with ESR in general. Sun has a great technology which needs to be "perceived" as free as in beer AND speech. Certainly Sun has some points in terms of complexity, but the conversation needs to be opened, and it is. If Sun wants to have a conversation with the top people from open source, and the top people from Sun, to discuss the future of Java, this needs to happen now!
.NET will otherwise become the standard, so stop arguing. Sit down and get everybody on the same page regardless of who is "right."
The future of mobile (which will be most of computing in the future) technologies is Linux and Java, with much of the infrastructure available for companies such as Sun.
I can't remember a time when Linus has been "disowned" as you say. What has he done/said that is offensive?
Lasers Controlled Games!
Stewardship is an important issue, a very important one actually. But there are still those sticky semi-legal points which can't be completely ignored. In this respect RMS, and to a lesser extent ESR, both are our stewards of Free Software. Just because Sun may be doing a good job, doesn't mean that we can ignore the technicalities.
Compare this to other important commercial "stewardships", such as Postscript and PDF as managed by Adobe. Those "standards" are completely under the control of Adobe, but aside from some recent DMCA nonsense, they've been very good stewards from a technical perspective. I mean compare Postscript with HP's PCL...which one has served Open Source/Free Software better?
But I think the Free Software community should hold higher standards of Freedom to language technologies like Java, whereas we may be willing to give a little more slack to data formats like PDF. But you know what, if Adobe stopped being good stewards then we'd be in trouble. Same for Java, only moreso. That's the threat ESR is trying to address.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
The Jargon Dictionary.
Founding member of the OSI.
A large number of HOWTOs
Ok, no one huge earth shattering project. An while I cant find it now, in one of the Fetchmail history docs, he readily admits to being a better maintainer then coder.
Even if he was a complete non-coder, The Jargon Dictionary alone would be enough for him to be 'one of the tribe', and worth listening too. But he has managed a not insignificant tool.
But all of that is nothing compared to his work with OSI. Even before that, his non-technical guidance and writings were immensely helpful to the community. Netscape/Mozilla was one of (if not the) first example of closed source being let free. And its still one if the biggest examples.
ESR may have a bit of a primiadonna attitude, but compared to RMS he is humble as they get.
...was pretty good about Java. I've been writing in Java for a long time now, and I like it a lot.
The only gripe I have is that a lot of systems don't have the newer Java 2 VM (it's been out for a few years now, people, update your VM already). A lot of people are still operating with the older standard, so I have to keep the older JDK 1.1.8 development kit around. Sun, if you're reading, launch an ad blitz, educate the nontechnical to visit java.com and grab an updated VM. And make sure you hit some of the "neglected" computer users too, such as school districts. Perhaps press a few million CDs with the Java VM and offer to mail them for free, or reduced postage?
The Java of today is much better than the perceptions of many developers. Java is decently fast, the Swing packages offer a lot of flexibility, i/o support is terrific, etc.
Just one last plea: PLEASE, SUN, stop labeling everything you sell Java. You're diluting the brand.
Sun, like many others, are just jumping on the OSS bandwagon. Anyone who believes that they are really behind the OSS movement is naive. At least MS isn't trying to hide who they really are. Sun would close the door and lock the key if they could; OSS for them, is a timely marketing campaign.
He also wrote bogofilter, a very useful bayesian filter.
This isn't, strictly speaking, an ad hominem attack.
"Ad hominem" refers to a form of logical fallacy where you attempt to discredit the person making an argument, instead of the argument they actually made. Had Phipps simply said, "ESR is a doo-doo head, and therefore his argument holds no water," it would be one thing.
However, that's not what happened. Phipps spent some time pointing out specific problems with Raymond's analysis. They are (paraphrased, and without critical analysis):
Regardless of your opinion of the merits of Phipp's analysis, it certainly rises above the level of "tree hugger," or "communist," two epithets which would be ridiculously applied to ESR, an avowed gun-nut and libertarian. In fact, other than referring to him as "out of touch," I don't see a single negative statement regarding Eric Raymond personally in the article.
But hey, way to go with your sly anti-businessman attack. Because as everyone knows, MBAs are all simpletons and schoolyard bullies.
I don't agree. RMS (who I am no big fan of) certainly has strong and unrelenting views, but Raymond is much bigger into self-promotion than RMS is. Plus, as the original poster points out, RMS has done a lot more for the open (small caps) software movement than Raymond has, so I'm more inclined to cut him slack.
Raymond seems as interested in getting his name in lights as helping "the cause."
Similar issues apply to copyrights. I assume there are portions of the Java implementation which are copyrighted from other companies which have licensed to Sun, but do you think these agreements are compatible with Sun putting something out under GPL or BSD? I wouldn't think so.
All of this is a bummer, to put it one way. I can think of some awesome projects to do with Java. How about a TRUE Java Desktop, where we take just enough of the Linux kernel to boot, and rewrite most of the system (device drivers and all) in Java and run the JVM essentially on the "bare metal" with all the apps in Java? That would be awesome, but impossible unless the JVM is Open Source.
Ah, and this brings me to MONO, a project which is a tragedy because it is walking into a big trap called "patents".
The right thing to do is to put the effort into gcj and Kaffe to bring them up to commercial usability. I really think it is time to abandon C/C++ for writing apps. We could debate this all day long (ok, on /., we could debate it until the heat death of the Universe) but the fact is that C++ is a pain to work in and lacks the safety features of Java. I would love to see Open Source development shift to Java. I am scared of Open Source development shifting to MONO/C# because I know that it's a trap.
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Create a WAP server
Try: here
-- "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur."
- Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.
> Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask
> Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun's
> when I just checked.
Yes, and the last time I checked Sun had a market cap. of $19.2B and RedHat had a market cap of $3.2B. The actual share price is irrelevant in this discussion. Sun is 6 times the size of RedHat on market cap.
In addition look at their balance sheets. Sun has assets worth $12B, RedHat has $440M. So Sun has assets worth 27 times RedHat's.
So how does the fact that the Sun share price is lower than RedHat's figure into this?
John.
Phipps is right, but so is Raymond.
Java's major consumer right now is large-scale contractors. Particularly government contractors. You know, the folks who care about CMM3 and similar such stuff. Those folks couldn't care less about open source or closed source. The only thing that worries them about Java is sun's stock price -- an indicator that Sun may not be around much longer.
If Sun is missing the boat with those consumers, they're doing so in their failure to charge enough money for Java's use. These organizations have big budgets and could afford to pay Sun for Java if Sun could figure out how to ask.
On the other hand, ESR is right too. Windows is an aberration in the history of computing in the sense that just about nothing else has ever become and stayed ubiquitous when the company that started it held the reins too tightly. Even Windows didn't hold the reins tightly on its rise to ubiquity -- DOS was widely pirated by computer vendors without retribution and Windows leveraged that existing monopoly on its rise.
Sun has a choice to make with Java: They can keep 99% of a small market or they can keep 20%-30% of a market that's 10 times larger or more. They seem to have chosen the former, and their stock price reflects this.
I have to disagree with ESR on one point, though: The key problem with Java is not that it isn't open source. They key problem is that the presence of the runtime environment is not transparent to the user.
If you're using a C program or a visual basic program or a fortran program or a just about any other kind of program, you don't know it and don't care. The program installed itself when you clicked on the install file or when you told the package manager to go get it. End of story.
If you're running a Java program, you know it. You know it, because you had to go through Sun's specific Java installer, and read and agree to a massive click-through license. You had to do that even if the Java program came with a JRE.
If Sun wants Java to become ubiquitous, they will have to give up the click-through license on the JRE and also give up control of the installer for the JRE. No other language's runtime libraries require such a ridiculous thing, and none should.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Sun is as much a hardware company as it is a software company.
Mandrake, Lindows, etc are new companies trying to start up with an open source model. I believe something like 75% of new restaurants go out of business in the first year. That doesn't mean that the restaurant is an unsupportable business model. Not every company that trys to link its success to the open source business model is going to succeed. That doesn't mean that none of them are going to succeed.
The question is, does going completely open source make sense for Sun? Since I've never founded or run a multi-million dollar business, my opinion is probably a bit suspect but it seems like it makes sense to me. In fact, it seems like Sun's only hope is something along those lines. Their current course is simply going to continue them along their slow slide into obscurity.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Sure, Sun's been a pretty good steward. But that's not the point: java could be doing so much better as free software. A free java would have at least two big advantages:
Sun has basically left some parts of the "standard java libraries" to rot. That applies to Swing in particular: no major changes here the last few years. One example: there is still no support for Cleartype or Xft, so fonts are looking pretty 1997-ish in Swing. And fonts are kind of a big deal in any gui-based app.
But more importantly: free software is more dependable. If Sun should fold, no one knows what would happen to java. If Sun gets into serious financial difficulties, it might stop making the JDK available as a free download. Etc.
That risk would disappear over night if java was free software.
At the very least, the libraries should be opened up. It is fairly easy to create an open source VM (comparatively): java's virtual machine is fairly well specified.
The libraries are much harder to implement: the fine folks at GNU Classpath are working hard to provide a free version of the library (which is used in gcj, kaffe, jikes rvm, etc.). But since large parts of the library are so poorly specified, they will always be lagging "official java" quite a bit.
Free java! Or at least the libraries.
Javalobby's Rick Ross doesn't agree with ESR, but he doesn't agree with Sun either, saying that "No Sun Is An Island" and urging Sun to take much more initiative in helping create what Ross calls "a cooperative industry alliance for Java platform marketing." Well worth reading.
You forgot this little program...
Considering that OpenOffice IS a pretty major piece of IP, that Sun DID dual license under their community license AND the GPL, I'd say they're not guilty of the issue on #2.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
> The Jargon Dictionary alone would be enough for him to be 'one of the tribe', and worth listening too. He's widely considered to have fucked up the Jargon File, mostly due to his huge ego and lack of respect for history.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
nice. how does it go?
"Counted, counted, and you're time is up?"
The Aramaic words "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" may be translated literally as, "It has been counted and counted, weighed and divided."
But in an effort to reach out to modern readers, a newer and more accessible translation (which nevertheles retains for metrical reasons the Old English form "belongen") renders it as:
"Pwned, Pwnded, make your time, to us are belongen all your base."
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
From ESR's original letter:
"Sun's insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged Sun's long-term interests by 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."
ESR's theory that Python and Perl have more users than they deserve due to Java's merely gratis license is insulting to the people who work hard to make Python and Perl as good as they are.
Regards,
Ed
Don't be a wanker. And why do posts like yours - that are clearly false - always get a +5 interesting? Since when are blatant lies interesting? Besides fetchmail, ESR has contributed to the linux kernel, GNOME, python, nethack, EMACS, SourceForge, Texinfo, the PNG libraries your browser is using to render all those pretty pictures after the whole gif thing, and no doubt a lot more. He's written books, FAQs, documentation, etc. He gained the ear of executives in the computer industry. Go ahead and grep the files on any flavor of unix, commercial or free, and ESR is one of the few names that is almost guaranteed to come up.
After a few days in which we were quite alarmed, Sun's technical director sent me an email to apologize and said he would fix the matter. Within no time, we got reports of being mentioned on the back of the cd covers and their website, and they sent us an evaluation cd. Our project was even mentioned in an article about JDS in the Guardian. There hasn't been much contact since, but it's good to see how quick they react.
Frankly, I didn't even think they gave a damn, but it seems that despite their size they are trying to do The Right Thing(tm). It's a pity ESR had to open his mouth like he did. They are willing to listen, but at least say something intelligent...
This sig is intentionally left blank
Fetchmail is the application that ESR is most well known for, but it's not the one that he has done the most work on. He simply used it as an example in CatB. Pick up any book on programming and you are likely to find examples. These examples are generally trivial, but the book wouldn't be the same without them. CatB was instrumental in explaining how Linux had become such a useful tool in so little time, fetchmail was simply a contrived example to prove the point.
As for the rest of ESR's hacker credentials. Well the initials ESR show up quite a bit in the software that I tend to use. Huge portions of Emacs were done by him (at one point he was the single largest contributor besides RMS, I don't know if that is true today), ESR also has credits in Python, the Linux kernel and piles of other projects that lots of people use everyday (like Nethack or bogofilter).
Here's a more comprehensive list of the ESR's work. Don't forget to click on the "projects" link for work that isn't classified as "software (termcap/terminfo database maintainer, for example, or the fact that he wrote the former Sunsite's Trove software). If you can honestly read that list of software and still come to the conclusion that ESR has done "nothing," then I would love to see your long list of Free Software accomplishments.
Don't get me wrong. I don't always agree with ESR, but I at least know enough about him to know better than to dismiss his credentials as a hacker.
Besides, on this ESR is right. Sun's Java desktop is indicative of the staggering amount of truly good stuff that is coming out of the Free Software community. Free Software hackers want to support Sun in its fight against Microsoft, but they aren't interested in using Sun's non-free Java language to do it. The funny part of Sun's Java Desktop is that there is essentially no Java involved. In fact, some of the same folks that wrote the Gnome desktop that comprises the bulk of Sun's Java desktop are right now working feverishly to finish off the first version of Mono, a .NET-alike for Linux. If Java was Free Software there would be a lot less incentive to do this, but Java isn't Free, and so the Mono hackers are cooking up a set of tools that can take its place for Free Software hackers.
What's worse, it's not like Sun can honestly say that they don't want to Free Java for commercial reasons. Java is currently available as a free download. Sun doesn't really make any money from Java.
If Java was defined by its source rather than the specification MS or any other company would put out their own versions, and cross-platform compatibility would be destroyed in an instant. As it is anyone is free to do their own implementation of Java and open source it. Why not ask IBM to open source their JVM?
"Japhar is the Hungry Programmers' Java VM. It has been built from the ground up without consulting Sun's sources.
Japhar is released under the LGPL, which should make it much more attractive for companies interested in embedding an open source JVM in their proprietary/commercial products."
"Kaffe is a clean room implementation of the Java virtual machine, plus the associated class libraries needed to provide a Java runtime environment. The Kaffe virtual machine is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License."
"The Classpath project aims to develop a free and portable implementation of the Java API (the classes in the Java package). The Classpath project does not have a complete implementation of the API yet but it is almost complete to version 1.2. Unfortunately, Classpath does not yet run with Kaffe - but we are working on it!"
"The Classpathx project is developing free implementations of all the extention libraries in popular use. This is a large and varied list, from XML processing to voice and image manipulation."
GCJ is a portable, optimizing, ahead-of-time compiler for the Java Programming Language. It can compile: * Java source code directly to native machine code, * Java source code to Java bytecode (class files), * and Java bytecode to native machine code. Compiled applications are linked with the GCJ runtime, libgcj, which provides the core class libraries, a garbage collector, and a bytecode interpreter. libgcj can dynamically load and interpret class files, resulting in mixed compiled/interpreted applications. Most of the APIs specified by "The Java Class Libraries" Second Edition and the "Java 2 Platform supplement" are supported, including collections, networking, reflection, and serialization. AWT is currently unsupported, but work to implement it is in progress.