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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...
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.
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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.
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).
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
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
OK, you're right. He's pretty useless. At least he likes Jaegermeister, I hear.
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Funny, this seems to be one of those double standards. People like ESR and Linus are praised and recognized as the fathers of OSS, heros among their kind, but as soon as they say something offensive you disown them.
In life, whether personal, corporate, OSS, whatever, when you associate yourself with an organization, your actions reflect that organization to some degree. If ESR had said "these comments are solely my own and do not represent any organization I take part in", I could agree.
STFU.
no comment
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.
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.
Ever,
Heard of OpenOffice/StarOffice? If you haven't I suggest you look it up. You might change you opinion of Sun's contributions to open-source software.
Caution: Contents under pressure
'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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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.
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.
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.
Since when is Sun a friend of open source?
Sun pays for NFS v4 port to Linux.
Sun supports Xemacs.
Sun donates internationalization code to X.org.
Sun buys StarOffice and donates the code to OpenOffice.
Sun support development and porting of TCL.
Sun donates elliptic curve technology to openssl.org.
Etc., etc., etc.
Sun established open standards, such as: NIS, NFS, etc., etc.,...
Sun is a much bigger friend to "open source" and *nix than just about any other corporation.
So, are you trolling, or uninformed? Maybe just abusing a friend to open source?
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.
> 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.
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
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?
Agreed.
However, the perception is that java is largely a free, open platform. And that perception is largely accurate.
In the article the question is raised: why has nobody created a free java platform? One answer is that it's a deep platform and expensive to build and maintain. However, look at GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, which are even larger. So why no free java? Because it's already free enough for most people. Sun has reached a compromise (gasp!).
Linux and FreeBSD are answers to something like windows or propretary UNIX, which aren't anywhere near a compromise in terms of freedom. So it was much more critical.
Maybe it's good for Sun to open java more. It's definitely better for the community (and how could you argue otherwise?), but Sun needs to look out for itself to a degree. And don't think for a second that it's an "evil company" or something.
If 10% of the people who want java open donated 10% of the increased usefulness of java being open to Sun, java would be bought into the public domain in no time. So, don't blame Sun.
Perhaps what we need is a little organization. If someone started a fund to buy Java into the public domain, or buy sun engineers to maintain an open java implementation and standard, I'd donate. I don't even use java, but I figure it would benefit me indirectly enough to make it worthwhile. Of course, we need real organization, I want to either see java be open or my money again, one or the other.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.