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ESR Responds to Sun's Claims of Being a Better Bazaar
UnixSphere writes "Sun has been quoted to have said, 'Sun's Java is developed more in the mode of the bazaar than Linux is,' which has prompted OSI President Eric Raymond to correct Sun's view of what open source really is."
Why are they quibbling? It's all really bizarre to me! (The two are on the same side, right? Or did Microsoft's settlement with Sun change things?)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I think he may have meant to say "Bizarre." Having dealt with support, I would agree with that statement.
Nothing more nothing less.
I would have thought they could both find more productive ways to spend their time. "I love mummy more! no I do! no i do" etc.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
"Why is this?" you might ask. It's governed by the simple fact that ESR has nothing better to spend his prodigious amounts of free time on than the literary equivalent of listening to himself speak. I really wish Slashdot wouldn't encourage this guy by posting a story about him, because he really doesn't matter.
I'm not sure who to support here....because Sun really sucks these days (and this is coming from someone who was a huge fan back in the olden days of SunOS), but ESR is a huge twat as well...
Ah well, screw both of them.
Certainly a cathedral model.
Eric Raymond didn't write Sendmail, it might explain alot if he had but I suspect you're thinking of the equally sucky fetchmail ( which he didn't write either IIRC ).
Didn't Microsoft try to make their own Java implementation(J++) and didn't sun go after them for it because it didn't stick to the java standards? Is that open source?
If you don't like the linux kernel you can take the code, make your own kernel, and even break whatever standards you want....Linus isn't going to drag you to court for breaking the POSIX standard or something.
Can the same be said or Java? In fact parts of it are still under a propietary license as the article states...so people who live in glass houses.....
Sendmail was written by Eric Allman, not Eric Raymond. You have become confused by Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs.
And here I thought the whole hacker v cracker debacle was silly. Be grateful for what comes and stop looking gift horses in the mouth.
Silly people.
More likely, assuming he wasn't trolling, he confused Eric Raymond with Eric Allman. So hard to keep the Erics straight these days...
Was this response an open letter or from an e-mail interview? I've checked out catb.org and OSI's website and can't seem to find any in depth response from ESR
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
I for one am glad that they don't open the possibility of a fork for Java. It would be a stupid move. Just look at all the bullshit that went down with Microsoft, their attempts to do so, and the resultant chilling effect that had on Java on the desktop.
If I was an American (god forbid) and Sun WAS to open source Java after spending all that time in court with Microsoft regarding their aforementioned forking, I'd say the appropriate thing to do would be to chase them down with pitchforks and torches for wasting so much taxpayer money.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Sun will not open source Solaris in the manner everyone is thinking! They will open up the code for review, but nobody will be allowed to use the code in their own software without paying money to sun.
.. Sun will not allow people to freely modify and/or re-use portions of the solaris code in their own products.
I dont see why everyone blindly trusts Sun. This is purely a publicity stunt. I repeat and let me make this clear
Solaris will be "open sourced" so that people can browse the code (maybe having clicked through or signed an agreement essentially barring the signer from helping to make any competing operating system. Ever.
There will be serious problems with Sun's license.
Read my lips:
SUN WILL NOT MAKE SOLARIS AVAILABLE UNDER AN OPENSOURCE.ORG APPROVED LICENSE.
unintentional pun I'm sure?
If there are two sides to this at all, the two sides are proprietary control over software and the freedom to modify software. While Sun has done some good for the OSS community in the past, wtih Java, Sun is firmly on the same side as Microsoft, since Java is under complete proprietary control. That's also no accident, since Java is the only major software product Sun has that is still of any relevance to the market.
Sun likes to cast these issues as "Sun+OSS vs. Microsoft" because it's good marketing, but that is an illusion and a lie. Sun helps OSS in some areas (which is nice), but with Sun Java, they have attempted an assault on open source and open standards. But Sun's assault is failing. The "cathedral" model under which Java is being developed is failing in the same way cathedral models have failed before: it's resulting in a bloated mess.
I did a "man fetchmail", and lo and behold ...
AUTHOR
Eric S. Raymond . Too many other people to name here have contributed code and patches.
This program is descended from and replaces popclient, by Carl Harris ; the internals have
become quite different, but some of its interface design is directly traceable to that ancestral program.
Sun's software was originally Stanford's and the various utilities were deveoped by whoever was hanging round the computer rooms - it might be better if ESR etc stopped trying to teach the Unix pioneers what Unix is.
This is not a signature.
I'm sure this has been discussed to death up until now, but how does open-sourcing an API work?
If there is a fork, doesn't that present huge problems for the development community?
And since Java is an interpretted (kind of) language, doesn't that pose a problem with compatibility?
At least with C, you have the benefit of compiling. With Java, you are compiling to java bytecode, which is still interpretted, and still prone to problems between the forks.
I guess you kind of experience this problem with shared libraries under *NIX, but at least you have the possibility for static compiling. You are stuck with the JRE for Java, no?
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Okay, after everybody decides to fight this one out, let's move on to some more important topics, like:
* windows vs. linux (vs. mac)
* vi vs. emacs
* creation vs. evolution
* republican vs. democrat (vs. independent)
I mean, that's all this kind of article can boil down to, so let's get the rest of today's arguments out of the way right now.
This is exactly the kind of semantic pissing contest that turns people off of open source people. Don't give this thing the wings it so richly doesn't deserve.
Sun is trying to market their products by taking advantage of the good will and trust that open source licenses have and misrepresenting their proprietary products as being associated with open source, and you blame "open source people" for it? You should be blaming Sun marketing and management. Their behavior has been reprehensible.
Open source people have better things to do than to worry about every single proprietary product out there. Get Schwartz and Sun to shut up about open source and cathedrals and bazaars and nobody will waste a second thought on Sun anymore. But as long as Sun keeps misleading people, open source advocates will respond because Sun's behavior is threatening the future of the open source movement.
I'd just like you all to know that I'm waiting with a cattle prod for the next person to make that joke. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind...
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Every F/OSS wannabe is diluting the notion of Open Source. And they're getting away with it.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I think calling one a cathedral and the other a bazaar really requires that any developer who wants to actually can create code for other people to use, and that they'll use it if it's good.
There are large barriers to doing that from both the Linux kernel and from Sun. A more bazaar like example is CPAN or sorceforge. Anybody who creates something coherent can have it published there for everyone to use.
Java and Linux are much more limiting. You can't "hawk your wares" in either case. That said, I don't think this should be absolute...more like a scale. Linux is closer to the bazaar than Java, I think.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Fragmentation is a huge problem if Java were to be open sourced and forked.
When Sun management was talking about bazaar, the management was being truthful. OSI and Sun are simply talking about two different kinds of bazaars. Sun is referring to its disinclination to hire American employees. OSI is referring to the technical setup of it software.
To those that are bad-mouthing ESR for responding, I think he should since Schwartz used ESR's reference in making his points.
And Sun doesn't get it completely. I applaud them for everything they have done, but if 'realists' look at whats going on, it seems to me that SUN is in bed with MS and will attempt to push Linux into obscurity if not out-right kill it if it can.
Maybe a third model can be added called Markets and it would more accurately describe SUN. They want to be the store you come to and you pick from the wares they choose to carry, from suppliers they choose, not you. They don't like small distributers and will undercut them until they go under, form unions you have to join to practice, and make laws so the little guy can't compete.
That's what I meant, he maintained and renamed an existing codebase, he did not write it from scratch.
We assume the OP was male because if it was a woman we wouldn't give a shit about her and would hope her feminist bitch ass would get hit by a bus.
It's because java isn't free (open source) software that it has to be forked (with GCJ, Kaffe, et al).
A nice, DFSG-compliant, GPL-compatible license would make all of our lives easier and a fork wouldn't be necessary.
speaks for the majority of Java developers. Most of us are happy with Sun's stewardship of Java. The platform is solid and feature rich with huge thirparty support. The JCP seems to work albeit slowly. The quality of the specs are very high.
Most Java developers have no intention of modifying or fixing the VM and are simply happy with the wonderful set of libraries available to them (Open source or otherwise).
As of 1.4, the quality of the Java VM has been ver good. JDK 1.5 rocks and the platform is alive and well. Thanks to Sun, IBM and mainly Apache.
Are things perfect? Not by any means. I just can not name one platform that I would substitue Java with to write my business applications.
But Eric S. Raymond did write The Cathedral and the Bazaar. If the Sun execs didn't want to hear anything from this man, they shouldn't have made their comments using such a metaphor he made famous in the community Sun is attempted to appeal to.
When Sun management was talking about bazaar, the management was being truthful. OSI and Sun are simply talking about two different kinds of bazaars. Sun is referring to its disinclination to hire American employees. OSI is referring to the technical setup of it software.
Things goes to something that has been bothering me recently. This isn't something that is new, I'm sure it's been around as long as we've had intelligent (hah!) expression. But it seems a bit more prevalent recently. I'm talking about presumably basically honest people being willing to misrepresent something to their (perceived) advantage as long as some loose interpretation of their words can be considered to be true. And by 'some' interpretation, I mean an interpretation other than what they hope the majority of their audience will make.
I don't know the first thing about Schartz, so maybe he's just a slime ball or maybe he just didn't understand the underlying concepts of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, but this sort of behaviour seems to be considered fair ball play these days. And I think it is something that should be left behind on the playground. Heck, it wasn't that common on most the playgrounds of my childhood, outside of certain particular types of debates (where it was understood that different rules of conduct held sway).
Am I right? Is there more of this in the public sphere these days? Or is it just the same-old, same-old?
Rome wasn't bilked in a day.
God is an American, you insensitive clod!
Free markets: nobody has a right to vote how you may or may not act with your own stuff - but if they don't like it, they can get their own stuff and do as they please instead, or go to someone else they prefer. Result: egregious misbehaviour causes a "fork" where customers move away. Also result: not only is the majority happy, but also all profitable minority niches of the market are served.
Not surprising ESR thinks this way considering he's a libertarian and possibly an anarchist
Yeah right! Magical open-source developers will come out of nowhere right?
If you want open-source Java, and feel serious about helping out, then you have GCJ and Kaffe.
Sun has allowed alternative JVMs for a long time and there are now many other JVMs to choose from.
You have your opportunity you develop Open-source Java, put your time and money where your mouth is, support Kaffe today!
Or do you just want to freeload off Sun's investement in their JVM?... Even if they already provide it for free.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
gcj and kaffe aren't forks; they're new implementations. But you're right that java's unfreeness is a large part of why they exist.
You're a suburbanite.
This is an insightful comment. It does not deserve to be moderated as flamebait. Shame on whomever descended into pettiness to do so.
Yes, it's semantical in the sense that 'open source' means something specific
"In the sense that..."???
I LOVE this. The self proclaimed hater of semantic debates is getting in a sideways quibble over the meaning of SEMANTICAL.
Tell us in what sense you like to use the word 'semantical', K98sven.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2