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Indonesia Adopts Java Desktop System on Linux
UltimaGuy wrote to mention a DesktopLinux.com article discussing Indonesia's adoption of a Java Desktop System on Linux as a national OS. From the article: "This desktop software will be a major component of the new Indonesia Goes Open Source (IGOS) program that aims to help eliminate the "digital divide in the world's largest archipelago," the ministry and Sun Microsystems said in a joint announcement. The ministry said it will develop its own IGOS-branded software stack using JDS on Linux as the base platform. The agreement with Sun -- for an unspecified number of years -- has the goal of installing copies of the open source-based desktop across Indonesia, beginning with its government-affiliated offices, the ministry said."
http://incubator.apache.org/projects/harmony.html
;-)
... ok, well this one I doubt :x
For those who does not know it is Apache incubation for creating a complete Opensources implementation of the Java Standard Edition platform.
So let's hope this will boost FSF in improving resources to GNU's Classpath as well
And maybe one day RMS will stop Java bashing
JDS may be open source, but Java's not. How can having an open source desktop based on a non-open source platform be truly considered open source?
Would you, personally, want all your personal IT, your company's IT, and your country's IT controlled by, say, a company in Russia or Germany?
One could argue that the exchange of sensitive documents is critical bureaucratic infrasctructure. While I agree that possibly some countries may not have on hand the skilled laborers to do the work required to switch to Linux, I believe that more and more nations will begin to jump at the chance to bring alot of tech work in house, creating a more empowered and educated work force while gaining more contorl over their data...all for potentially less than other options. Linux' supposed superioriy is not a necessity to this argument.
BenCurry.net
http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT2423661653
From this article:
Seriously, "sun's just work better"?
Many reasons.
Espionage or sabotage. Who's to say that, if relations soured between the US and [any given country using products therefrom] that these products wouldn't be used as a channel for espionage or sabotage? Even when relations are good, everyone capable of doing so spies on everyone else. If US products are going over there, American company representatives are going over there, and I'd be willing to bet there are plenty of people gathering intelligence to some degree.
At the very least, in the event of a war or economic embargo, continued access to the foreign products (and we're talking about software here for which one continually needs to get upgrades and security updates) would be seriously threatened.
Legal disputes. If there were intellectual property disputes over the product, licensing concerns, etc., guess whose laws are going to apply and in whose courts the situation would probably be handled.
In general, it's just not a good idea to rely on something that you don't have control over, don't you think?
Liberty in your lifetime
Huh? A Java system that seeks to deliver on the original promise of running everywhere? Who the hell wants that? ;-) [OK, I do.]
I have easily 20-30 languages installed on my several workstations, most of them not boasting great portability yet running just fine. The only language ever to refuse point blank to install and run on 75% of the attempted platforms is Java, the alleged run-anywhere language. Java's problems *in practice* exceed those of any other language I've used (and that's many dozens of them), by an order of magnitude.
Why this is so I have no idea, since in theory the opposite should have happened owing to VM abstraction. Alas, something went horribly wrong right across the Java community in their approach to portability, and not one of the various implementations I've tried is free of hassle and works everywhere. It's odd, and very frustrating.
I hope that Harmony remedies this. It's sad when such a great concept as Java is let down across the board by utterly inadequate implementations.
Excuse me, but didn't Sun drop JDS as a standalone product? As of release 3, they integrated JDS into Solaris. I didn't think JDS was available anymore just on its own.
From http://www.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem/:
Okay, so release 2 is still available on its own. But Sun's site seems to imply the standalone version is a dead-end, not developed anymore as a Linux distro / platform, that JDS has been wrapped into Solaris. I wonder why Indonesia went with a dead-end product?
Would you, personally, want all your personal IT, your company's IT, and your country's IT controlled by, say, a company in Russia or Germany?
Or, for that matter, India or China?
Don't forget that we in the US are in a similar situation...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP