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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.
Certainly a cathedral model.
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.
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'm sure this has been discussed to death up until now, but how does open-sourcing an API work?
Up to now, very few APIs have been proprietary. Sun has broken new ground by successfully asserting a high level of control over the Java APIs (not just their implementation).
If there is a fork, doesn't that present huge problems for the development community?
Languages like C, C++, Fortran, Perl, shell, and Python have all thrived in the absence of the level of control that Sun is trying to exercise. The reason is simple market economics: implementations that don't provide the features that users want disappear on their own.
Sun is trying to substitute their own interests for the wisdom and preferences of their end users. They are churning out one API after another, but users have no choice but to build on what Sun ships; even if there were alternative implementations, users would still be forced to accept whatever garbage Sun and the JCP dream up.
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.
Modern C programs have numerous shared library dependencies; Java's byte-code based system would, if anything, be more robust.
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?
You are only stuck with the JRE for Java because Sun keeps you from having a choice. If Java were an open standard, there would be dozens of different implementations, and those implementations would work out amongst themselves what features were important core features and what features were vendor-specific extensions.
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.
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.
Windows hatred is simply the modern equivalent of the hatred the Cobol and Fortran camps had of C. The future really hurts when it threatens to make your own skills obsolete.
.NET for the same reason C/C++ effectively beat Cobol/Fortran.
I think the analogy is apt, but backwards. The Cobol/Fortran and C camps had mutual dislike. Cobol/Fortran represented entrenched, well-paid, proprietary interests. It was the analog of Microsoft today. C represented the slightly chaotic, open, non-proprietary alternative, like Linux today. And today, the dislike between Microsoft developers and OSS is also mutual.
Microsoft hatred is all about protecting the value of guild crafts and nothing about principle.
Yes, and that sums it up: people are tired of paying a premium for the Microsoft guild crafts, in particular since VB/VC++/.NET developers in general just aren't very skilled technically. That is why OSS has taken off. And OSS will beat Microsoft Windows and
On Java it was Sun who were being the evil proprietary monopolists. Their objective was to reduce every platform to the level of Solaris, leveling down, not up. Suns approach was "If you dare do anything that I can't I'll sue you."
Java could have been the future of computing but there is no way that any company, let alone a declining company like Sun can be trusted with the complete control they demand. The chances of Sun ending up in a SCO like position in five years time are significant.
I fully agree with those points. I think Sun is worse than Microsoft: Microsoft represents a particular approach forcefully, but at least they are honest about it (wrong, and doomed to failure, but honest). Sun, on the other hand, is just misleading people about what they are doing. And I also see the danger of an SCO-like meltdown. However, I think people are wising up to the threat and Java is becoming less and less popular for OSS.
Sun went after Microsoft because they had a contractual agreement which stated they had to produce a product with certain attributes before they can call it "Java".
Sun has never prevented alternative Java implementation, there are many.
As far as open-source there is Kaffe, GNU Classpath, GCJ, Jikes and others.
All those projects need help. And I am sure Sun is not the reason they are not getting it.
Put your money and time where your mouth is and support open-source Java
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