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Sun's COO Distorts Free In Free Software
sebFlyte writes "Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's COO and president, said at JavaOne that 'the most important initial in free and open source software, to me, if you want to reach the broadest marketplace in the world there's one price that works for everyone, and that's free". As you can imagine, this interpretation of 'free' in terms of software has angered a few people somewhat, including Richard Stallman..." From the article: "The free software movement stands for 'free' as in freedom. The open source campaign doesn't present freedom as an ethical issue, but it still formulates its criteria in terms of what users are permitted to do,"
Somehow I just don't care.
Sun may be shooting themselves in the foot by refusing to join the FOSS movement. Simply offering software for free is obviously not good enough; they need to make it totally accessible for it to meet its potential.
But this doesn't matter, really. If Sun decides that they're going to keep their toys to theirselves, the FOSS community will come up with something to rival it. It happened with lots of other programs, and now we have OpenOffice, Linux, MonoDevelop, Audacity, PDFCreator, GiMP, Blender, Firefox, 7-Zip, and more. It can happen with Java, too.
Regardless of the fact that the new alternatives would no doubt mimic Java, the fact that their source would be universally available would give them an edge over the original.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
I was lucky enough to go to JavaOne, and was sitting in the room as he said this, and it indeed annoyed me.
Politics aside, Richard Stallman makes a very clear distinction between Open Source software and Free software. When people refer to FOSS (Free Open Source Software), they have added BOTH "free" AND "open source" to their acronym - this is to make a clear distinction between software that is merely open source, and software that is both free (as in speech) and open source.
Sure, free means "free of charge" as well as "free speech". I wouldn't dare argue that one definition is more valid than another.
But in the context of "FOSS" or "F/OSS" or even "FLOSS" (Free/Libre Open Source Software), the whole reason to add "Free" to the more traditional "OSS" was to convey "Free as in speech."
Why does it matter? I think Sun wants to confuse the community, and make people think that they are on a bandwagon that they *are not on*. I think Jonathan Schwartz knows what the "free" in FOSS means, and intentionally misused it to make people think that he was really buying into FOSS, when in fact, he hasn't, at least with respect to the the JVM and class files. This is the exact reason Apache Harmony was created.
If this doesn't make sense, try downloading the "Free" Sun JDK from anywhere other than java.sun.com. Try getting it to come bundled with a Linux distribution. You can't do these things, because it *isn't* free, they just don't make you pay for it (at least, for now).
The only other point I want to make is that the "free beer" definition buys you something right *now* - the ability to download the Sun JDK without them charging you for it. If you're getting it without paying, what's the big deal? The big deal is that tomorrow, they *could* start charging for it. And then you can only run as long as it takes for you to need some new feature, or support for new hardware or a new OS. Then you pay.
If it were really free, you don't just get it now, but you also get a guarantee that it will always be available free in some form, as long as people need it and are willing to work on it. And really, that is a big difference.
I have patched various machines with little kernel fixes (adding PCI_ID's to support the i810 chipset).
I've used the source when someone posted error messages to various mailings lists to see what section of the kernel was generating certain errors to troubleshoot the problem.
I've added lines of code to e2fsck and mount to support new functionality I wanted to simplify my problems.
I could run Solaris, but when I have a problem, I can't track it down. I can't read the source to see how critical an area the bug is or if there is a way to work around it. I can't ask the author's of the code if they can fix it by e-mailing them directly.
I know that the plural of annecdote isn't data. However, a lot of technical people I know feel the same way. We aren't the majority of people. However most sysadmin's I know would much prefer to have the source, even if they are never going to edit, or re-compile it. A lot of the people who support the users would much prefer they used open source. I'm a developer not an SA, but I play an SA from time to time.
I'm happier as a user if I am using free software, if only because I'm not beholden to the keeper of the secret source to provide me with a fix. If I feel like it, I can pay someone else to do it, or I can investigate the problem myself. If it is important enough, I'll fix it.
Kirby