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Sun Unilaterally Revokes the FreeBSD Java License
ravenII writes "The FreeBSD foundation has announced the news of Sun terminating the SCSL OEM-like license given to FreeBSD foundation. The foundation's attempts to contact Sun to renegotiate the license have gone unanswered. Javalobby.org also carries the news." It would seem that Sun has terminated all SCSL licenses across the board in preparation for the release of Java 5, and while the renegotiation process may be a bit bumpy, it's likely that Java will continue to be ported to FreeBSD.
Open source...
. sh tml
Solaris, Open Office, Danese
http://slashdot.org/interviews/02/01/10/1245221
All bs.
Makes money?
Iron fisted grip.
Looses money?
Open source, twist the knife in MS's ribs
No better than Apple or SGI.
Sun:
The 15bn dollar market cap company that was able to parlay Java into a 3bn dollar settlement with MS over virtual machine.
1/30 the size of Microsoft, 1/20 the size of their primary competition, IBM.
"More linux desktops" than any company in the world (in china).
Supports the open source community at their convenience. So much for "write once, run anywhere. If it ever was the case with effectively 5 forks in their own code.
Well, BSD is dieing anyway right?
And their java web server runs better in a non-SPARC, non Solaris enviroment anyway.
BSD is dieing?
Sun is dieing!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Well, actually, no one understands the meaning of Java as far as Sun's marketing strategy (or any other) is concerned. ;-)
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
Whether Sun did this intentionally or not, it still illustrates the situation surrounding Java on open platforms perfectly: Sun can revoke the license that lets you run Java on Linux or FreeBSD or anywhere else at any time. Furthermore, whether Sun actually intends to do so or not, it can happen for reasons beyond their control. If it isn't "dropping the ball", they may get acquired, they may go out of business, or they may decide that killing Java for Linux is suddenly in their best business interest.
The upshot of it all is: you're taking a big risk you make a significant investment in Java on any platform other than Solaris.