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James Gosling On The Sun/Microsoft Settlement

Posted by timothy on from the horse's-mouth dept.

greg_barton writes "James Gosling has responded to the two previous commentaries cited on Slashdot about the Java Dilemma. Some interesting excerpts: "In Rick Ross's 'Where Is Java In This Settlement?' he worries that Sun may have sold out the Java community. We didn't. We have not sold our soul to the Dark Side." and "There's a long thread of discussion on Slashdot 'Two Takes on the Java Dilemma' that is pretty entertaining, from a wow, what are they smoking! point of view. There are voices of reason, and conspiracy nuts.""

5 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great! by dastrike · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are Free open source implementations of Java already. Not quite up to the same level as the Sun's offerings yet, but it is difficult to hit a moving target...

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  2. Sun's Generous Patent Grant by Karma+Sucks · · Score: 5, Informative
    Here's a link to Sun's patent grant for the full Java.

    So Java seems to be less encumbered than .Net at this point.

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  3. Re:let's see what happens by nathanh · · Score: 5, Informative
    Plus with Sun you get policies that are just insane. No other word really describes the behaviour. Example: It is obviously in Sun's interest to see a JVM on as many machines as possible. Their JVM is a free download.

    Sun's JVM is a free download.

    But you can't even redistribute unmodified copies of it,

    That might be true for Sun's JVM.

    which is why no linux distro includes a JVM. To use Java under Linux requires a user to go search it out, download a non-trivial package and install it.

    You're simply wrong.

    $ apt-cache search jvm
    kaffe - A JVM to run Java bytecode
    sablevm - Free implementation of Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
    orp - Java VM and JIT from Intel Research Lab

    There are several free JVMs on Linux and they are trivial to install (apt-get install).

  4. Gosling's beef with RMS: Full Disclosure by voodoo1man · · Score: 4, Informative
    Heehee, time to dish out some dirt!

    Some of you may know this already, but for those who don't, RMS and James Gosling had a feud in the 80s over Gosling's Emacs (which was a TECO Emacs workalike). Apparently, there were agreements between Gosling and several other developers to the effect that they could modify and redistribute the source to Gosling's Emacs. RMS decided to base the original GNU Emacs on Gosling's code. Apparently, this happened after Gosling decided to sell the rights to his Emacs clone to Unipress, and bitter legal threats ensued. This seems to have been one of the primary motivations for the GPL. I've never seen Gosling speak or write about the incident since. RMS gave a speech in 1986 where he recounted the incident, and he didn't have a lot of good things to say about Gosling:

    "In the summer of that year, about two years ago now, a friend of mine told me that because of his work in early development of Gosling Emacs, he had permission from Gosling in a message he had been sent to distribute his version of that. Gosling originally had set up his Emacs and distributed it free and gotten many people to help develop it, under the expectation based on Gosling's own words in his own manual that he was going to follow the same spirit that I started with the original Emacs. Then he stabbed everyone in the back by putting copyrights on it, making people promise not to redistribute it and then selling it to a software-house. My later dealings with him personally showed that he was every bit as cowardly and despicable as you would expect from that history."

    That speech also has a few memorable quotes, and I highly recommend you read it. I haven't heard or read RMS referring to Gosling personally since, but I believe that the incident itself has been recalled by him a few times since.

    Now for my part of the disclosure: I currently attend the University of Calgary, where James Gosling is the only persona anywhere near to fame that the Computer Science department has ever produced (Theo de Raadt doesn't count, unless your definition of "produce" involves scandal and legal threats).

    The above is mostly just hearsay and speculation, and should not be taken as authoritative, except the excerpt from RMS's speech.

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  5. Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free by jrumney · · Score: 3, Informative

    See here, under the heading "The Historical Impact of the GPL", or google for Gosling RMS GPL.