James Gosling On The Sun/Microsoft Settlement

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.""

Comments

Re:Great!

[dastrike]

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...

• GCJ
• GNU Classpath

let's see what happens

[smd4985]

i'm going to 'have a little faith' and trust gosling and mcnealy. we haven't even seen what Sun's next move is yet hoards of /.'ers are freaking out. lets give these guys a chance before we dismiss them.

Re:let's see what happens

[nathanh]

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).

Someone help me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we hate Sun this week? Or was that next week?

Even starting to sound like microsoft

[tonythepony]

Unlike GPLd software, the Java sources don't come with a viral infection clause that requires you to apply the GPL to your own code

Didn't sell your soul, huh?

Re:Even starting to sound like microsoft

[dmaxwell]

You're perfectly free not to use even the tiniest bit of GPLed work in your project in the first place. You and many others seem to be confusing "freedom" with "utter lack of obligation". The GPL is intended to preserve certain freedoms for both users and developers.

A developer with no obligations to others can impose any condition he wishes on a user who desires to use his creation. If you wrote it all yourself and didn't put that tiniest bit of GPLed code in then by all means exercise that freedom.

A user with no obligations to developers can claim any benefit of the code for himself, up and to and including claims of authorship and invention. A user in that position can profit from that code in any way he wishes and return nothing to the developer....not acknowledgement, not improvements, absolutely nothing he doesn't feel like doing.

In the real world, there isn't a way for both users and developers to have no responsibilities whatsoever regarding software. There are a lot of ways to balance the situation so that both sides can retain significant freedoms hence the spectrum of FOSS licenses. Most of these compromises between original developers and downstream recipients can reasonably be called free. ALL of them have restrictions or obligations for at least the recipient of a software package. Even the "truly free" BSD licenses absolutely require that the copyright notice be preserved. It also implictly requires acknowlegement that author had the right to license his work that a way and indeed still owns the original work. It is a dangerous subtlety for the likes of SCO to miss if they try to do to the BSD community what they are doing to the Linux community.

The GPL preserves certain liberties (the so-called "four freedoms") as long as certain responsibilities are accepted. You seem to want those liberties without the responsibility, that "tiniest bit of GPLed code". If you don't use that code then there isn't much argument is there?

I suppose that leaves room for the ongoing semantic debate over what freedom actually is. But there is no reasonable definition of freedom that doesn't include responsibility.

Re:Where is IBM in the settlement?

[Anarcho-Goth]

People talk about Microsoft competitors yet they raise company names like Sun, Real, or Netscape.

I would guess that this is because before Microsoft was the big evil corporation that is going to take over the world, IBM was.

The difference being that IBM cut down dramatically on acts that could potentially be interpreted as anti-competative, and maybe even took a step back. I remember some IBM people telling me that IBM made a lot of bussiness mistakes in the late 80s early 90s. This might or might not be related to the IBM anti-trust trial, but before then they had stopped being quite so ruthless.

The difference between IBM's and Microsoft's anti-trust trials were I don't think IBM ever got convicted, and they cut it out anyway so it became a moot point, while Microsoft was convicted, but nothing is being done to tame them.

IBM is the only company in the world that could realistically engage in a multi-front competitive battle with Microsoft.

True, and one would hope that an IBM monopoly would at least write better software than Microsoft. And they are supporting Linux right now so they might be content to share the wealth, as long as they are still making buckets of money themselves, and not force the entire world to use crappy software.

1st law of thermodynamics

[alan_dershowitz]

As for Richard Stallman's "Free but shackled: The Java trap," it's hard to know where to begin. He has his own rather peculiar definition of "free" that I think violates the First Law of Thermodynamics (energy is conserved): Developers put a huge amount of energy into creating software, and if they can't get that energy back in a way that balances, then the system falls apart.

Art doesn't obey the first law of thermodynamics either. Some people put their whole life, unrecognized, into creating art, and when they are long gone, their work is still with us. COMPENSATION and BUSINESS obey the 1st law of thermodynamics, but that is by no means the only driving force behind people.

Sun's Generous Patent Grant

[Karma Sucks]

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.

Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free

[elmegil]

RMS is essentially a kook.

Let's see. My first exposure to RMS was being told as an undergrad that if I wanted to, I could go log into his accounts at MIT because he didn't bother to keep a password. He has proceeded to rant and rave and rail against anything that is not his pure community of software technicians giving their every line for the greater good.

RMS is essentially a kook.

I couldn't have said it better myself. He has certainly done many great things with his efforts, but in the general scheme of things, he's a kook. If you weren't so hung up on taking the observation personally and finding people to label "Anti Free" perhaps you'd be better able to accept this.

Finally, and to the point, Gosling doesn't call him a kook; he comments that RMS has a peculiar (as in unique) definition of "Free". Some of his comments about GPL are less charitable, but they don't involve whether RMS is a kook or not.

Free but not as in Beer

[Virtucon]

The debate between the GPL folks and Java folks will go on for quite awhile, the big point here is that IBM has more people working on Java and Java based solutions that Sun. Sun has lost the momentum in the Java arena in some areas. Yes the JSR process does produce standards, but IMO If I look at technologies like J2ME, the industry is still fragmented. You may be able to build J2SE applications and run them on Windows, Linux, Solaris or what have you and have a reasonable expectation of WORA however J2ME isn't there, after 3 years. So, putting WORA aside the fragmentation in J2ME even with Palm demonstrates that Java becomes a utilitarian application delivery infrastructure that may or may not be ubiquitious.
Palm and Sun had differences of J2ME, Palm works with IBM and viola, J2ME for Palm the way palm wanted it, not Sun.

So, from a technology High Ground, Sun doesn't control Java explicitly, and that's a good thing. Sun's controls on Java do make sense as Gosling pointed out however let's not forget the J2EE 1.2 specification that was held up by a voting member because of EJB 2.0 compliance issues. In this case the JSR voting member had a conflict with voting on the spec while their product didn't adhere to it. So, EJB 2.0 gets held up, which holds up J2EE 1.2. That happened and the company's initials have a B in them, but it's not IBM.

So, while the JSR process isn't perfect, the thought that vendors are most of the JSR participants isn't all bad, unless a log jam occurs. Maybe someday J2ME will be as ubiquitious as J2SE, J2EE isn't quite there yet, but getting there. Let's also not forget the whole JBoss issue, but that's another thread.

Did you even read the article?

[Anonymous Coward]

About a third to half of the article you're supposedly responding to consists of Mr. Gosling claiming the exact set of baseless allegations your post brings up to be false. In fact, attempting to refute such allegations appears to have been one of his primary reasons for writing said article.

Did you just not notice this? Or did you not read the article? I'm leaning toward the second, since first off it references nothing in this article whatsoever, and second that's an awful long and carefully-formed post to have gotten FP on. Either you read and type reeeal fast, or you wrote this beforehand and waited for another Sun story so you could grab an early post number and get up to Score:5.

So, at any rate, let's give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you read the article. So is what you are implying by your post that you believe Mr. Gosling to be lying when he explicitly brings up the things you allege and says they are entirely untrue and without basis? Why?

Re:Where is IBM in the settlement?

[Anarcho-Goth]

It kills me that all these OpenSource advocates want things to be FREE. The opensource developers donate all their FREE time to developing Linux which IBM can turn around and sell hardware to run linux which they get for FREE which returns PROFITS for IBM.

Funny, I thought that was the whole point of the GPL, it is so free, you can make money off of it.

But I think it will be a while yet until we see Linux take over AIX. But it would be nice to have smit on linux.

This reminds me of a quote in someone's .sig:

• ESR: I want to live in a world where software doesn't suck.
  
• RMS: Any software that isn't free sucks.
  
• Linux Can I have Free Beer?

Primarily what I want is software that doesn't suck.
If it is GPLed too all the better.
If IBM makes a profit from it good for them.
If I can make a profit from it then I'm really happy :)