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Microsoft wins Annulment of Sun's Java injunction
Will in Seattle writes "A new InfoWorld story on a court annullment of the Sun injunction against Microsoft over Java. Arr, matey, the seas be choppy right now, first to port, than starboard, then port, then starboard. Abandon ship, all ye Java geeks!"
1: That's not saying much. If you take shrink-wrap licenses as signatures, the majority of America has signed a contract with M$.
2: You don't have to sign a contract with M$ to be screwed by them. They're an equal-opportunity fiend.
Sun's mistake was to attempt to defy Microsoft with something as small as a multiplatform language. You don't bring that weak stuff around Microsoft. We may, repeat may be having an effect on them with the combined weight of the government (personified by the DoJ) and a software development model most companies can't even grok, much less fight (that is, OSS).
Any attempt to remove Microsoft's hammerlock on the software licensing industry has failed, plain and simple. The only reason that Linux is actually winning these days is that it is avoiding that industry entirely.
While MS has its hammerlock on the software license industry, Linux and other projects are creating a new industry of software service. Microsoft can have their licensing monopoly. The open source movement is attemptint to do nothing less than marginalize the software licensing industry. Since Microsoft owns that industry, they are simply suffering collateral damage.
They can use every last trick in the book to keep a monopoly on sailing vessels. We're selling steamships. We aren't trying to render Microsoft obsolete; we are trying to render software licensing obsolete.
--The basis of all love is respect
as
peanut butter is to water
I.e., Microsoft is doing their usual thing of taking a competing technology which supports multiplatform use and using their market clout to either a) take over the market with thier own competing product and/or b) simply trashing the technology's reputation by getting their fingers into it and making it only work in their favor.
We've seen this in many technologies (browsers, Jscript, J++, streaming video, etc.), not to mention direct competing products where the target company was either out-right bought out, squashed by illegal business tactics, or the technology 'fudged with' to make it only work reliably in Microsoft's favor. It's funny to see the lawsuits for Win3.1 apps finally be making it out of the courts, but it doesn't matter since nobody uses Win3.1 anymore...
Microsoft is pure EVIL. Their inability to innovate while at the same time squashing other companies' innovation has brought OS and app development to a stand-still for about a decade now. Many former, present, and even future M$ employees admit this. It's no wonder that open-source projects have kept moving (and caught up!) while commercial products have been mysteriously stagnant for a decade or so. That's a very, very long time to see this little innovation (besides Internet related which M$ has had little to do with).
--Phil
As others have said, this decision seems much more a procedural and technical thing rather than anything presaging a specific result that would be injurious to Sun.
In general, I think Sun has passed the point with Java where they would be very vulnerable to Microsoft's predations. When Sun initially licensed Java to Microsoft, Java was honestly rather weak in many areas, but Java 2 (aka 1.2), with Swing and all the many other enhancements and APIs make it much less necessary to need to drop down to an operating system to be able to develop a rich application.
It's unclear whether Sun still dreams of kicking Microsoft off the desktop to any extent, but if they do, I'd say they need to work on a rich and portable way to package and distribute Java programs.. it would be great to be able to distribute a single archive and to have an executable script activate to unpack and install the software, much like with rpm's and and with InstallSheild on Windows. It would be especially great if it was written in Java and allowed local administrators to write their own Java methods to configure the local software install logic so that they could take an operating system-generic package and install it in accordance with local practices.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
I love the Java language. It's easy to learn (especially with a C background), in demand for jobs, and efficient for doing business programming.
The downside? The big companies (most especially Sun) are killing off innovation. There's lots of Java component companies around, but not nearly as many as there would have been if Sun didn't keep taking all the really cool ideas and APIs and bundling them with the enterprise APIs.
I know--there are good development projects, exciting development projects with free software that are going on. But I can't help but feel like Sun is really trying to be the Microsoft of the Java industry. I remember all the neat widgets that came out because AWT 1.0 sucked so bad. And I remember how a lot of those seem to have dried up since Swing.
Personally, I foresee Java becoming marginalized into two pockets of development--big pockets, but pockets nonetheless. We'll see Java development in the enterprise, side by side with the VB-heads, and we'll also see Java in the embedded, consumer, and "pocket" markets. Developers in other development areas have been so burned by the actions of Microsoft and Sun in trying to take over Java that there won't be the desire to create the next cool thing in Java. Instead, expect it (like we've been seeing over the past year) in Perl, Python, Tcl, or the like.
Blech. Congrats soulless corporations. I code Java nine hours a day at work, and I don't see a lot of future for it outside the enterprise. Torvalds was right--much as I don't want to admit it.
Chris
PPl that make the duh decisions are upper/middle level managers. What software do they need? Word processing (not that they write documents, they just need to read and print them), transmission of the documents (e-mail attachments), spreadsheets (not that they generate spreadsheets, they just want to read em), and finally, viewgraphs (not that they, well you get the point).
The upper level managers that I deal with are technically clueless. They don't want their secretaries figuring out different formats. I swear that they are the first to upgrade to the next incompatible version of Word or PowerPoint thereby forcing the others to upgrade. No, No, just save this document with the previous format version. Sorry, too hard to comprehend. The ironic part is that they don't need or use the new features. I/we just got another PowerPoint "template" to fill out. Except the format was not a template except for how the final viewgraphs should look like.
Why am I rambling about all of this? Is there a java based program(s) that provides all of this upper management functionality? All most of these bozos need is java script capabilities so that their web browser works okay.
Back on subject. Sun will probable win this round. MS will put their normal spin on this. Sorry for this off-topic rant but obviously I'm kind of pissed off at this time.
BTW, I work for THE MAN who is part of THE MAN that blindly uses PHB friendly software. (Geez, I really had a bad day at work today.:))
Don't get me wrong, commercial unices were no shangri la, but windows didn't really do all that much of what you're talking about.
Plenty of windows programs don't work accross windows version (though they are in the minority, granted).
As for the UI choices, you are right. There's just one and frankly it's mediocre. Why is choice such so abhorrent to corporate types? Why are you people so god damn scared of someone having their kill-window button in a different place than yours? Hint: pop up an xterm and you can do everything that you could have done before just as efficicnetly for the most part. Hell, telnet into the box, you'll never have to know what the UI on the box looks like. heaven forbid that users actually read a bit of the documentation or take a look at the tooltips.
God, so much time in an office is wasted chatting, walking to the bathroom, coffee room, etc. that the hour spent on learning the keybindings for a particular application is very minor. You people talk like you're dealing with robots, for God's sake! They'r epeople. They're inefficient by design. You're never going to get maximal productivity out of them, they won't give it.
And please don't talk about libraries. Yes, in unix you have to figure out which to use. The windows way is much worse - they decide for you then tie you to a particular version, overwriting your current verision if they possibly can.
What windows did, more than anything else, was to introduce the paradigm of the crash into computers. Sure, things were buggy before, but windows dies ona fairly regular basis, at least if you tend to install and remove programs from it (though installing is usually enough on its own). That or crash.
Windows did set back the computing industry in many ways. They substituted glitz for quality, not unpredictably, and moved the computer industry in that direction.
Oh, and do you code for win32, MFC, VB, J++, or what? Don't give me this bullshit that there's one and only one way of doing things in windows. Windows is as much of a pain in the ass as anything else (if you really use it), it just works less and is a closed box, so you can't fix it when it breaks. Frankly, it's a black mark on human history that I just wish would be erased. Profit and greed don't have to go together, merciless immoral bloodsucking doesn't have to have anything to do with profit at all. I want to be rich. Very rich. I just also want the world to be better off for me having existed, too. Microsoft seems to have completely disregarded that second one.
"For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?"
Less prfound, what does it gain a man if he gains the whole world but destroys it in the process?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
The lifting of the injunction means that Microsoft can use Sun's trademarks on all sorts of crap. Further muddying the already murky waters of Java development, particularly on the Pointy-Haired Boss level.
Also, while the judge said that Sun was likely to win the breach of contract case, he said he didn't see any copyright infringement case there. If Sun wins the breach of contract case, all that happens is some cash changes hands from Microsoft to Sun, big whoop. For it to mean anything to people outside of Sun, the court needs to be ruling on the copyright infringement part of the case. Such a ruling has the potential to have much stiffer penalties, and more effect on how Microsoft does business.
----
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Open mind, insert foot.
Sun does not want any variants of Java. By releasing the code under the GPL or LGPL, they would allow others to make variations of Java that are not compatible with Sun's spec. This would completely defeat the purpose of Java! Sun wants only one version of Java, and they want to make sure it's the right version. After all, they created the language.
I think Sun could being a much worse job with Java. I think they're goal of ensuring that all versions of Java are compatible is the right one.
If you want to write Windows code with the Java language, you can use J++. Microsoft doesn't need Sun's permission to make their own implementation of a Java compiler. But, if you want to make a cross-platform app, then you need Sun to take a strong-arm approach to JVM implementations. Otherwise, you'll never get around to debugging your app on all these platforms.
I've seen the Dante-esque code written for complicated web applications. Not only is the syntax unreadable, but because of the loose scoping and typing rules, its faulty and a nightmare to reverse-engineer.
This is the most common criticism of Perl, but I am convinced that it reflects on the the programmers more than on the language. A skilled Perl programmer can be counted on to write clear, maintainable code; in recent years, the language has acquired a number of features to make self-documentation very easy. But I, too, have inherited abonimable code, and it has invariably been the due to the cluelessness of my predecessors.
One of the main problems, I think, is that the WWW began to boom while Perl was still in version 4, when it took off as a favored language for CGI programming. Perl 4 had a number of misfeatures that were corrected in Perl 5. But although Perl 5 has been around for years, too many programmers have never unlearned the bad habits they picked up back then.
True, its good that you don't have to worry about memory allocation, exception, etc. But these constructs are there for a very good reason: what happens when your Perl code runs out of memory. It will probably crash irrecovarably.
Of course you have to worry about exceptions, and Perl helps you with that if you use it properly. But the bit about memory allocation is nonsense. You never have to tear your hair out malloc()-ing and free()-ing all over the place in Perl, and a programmer should never have to. You can eat up too much memory in Perl, say by leaking references or allocating arrays that are excessively large, but that again is a sign of poor programming skill. No language can save from your own weaknesses; a less experienced programmer will create much more havoc with malloc() and free() in any case. And Perl doesn't crash on exhausted memory, it exits politely with an error message.
I wrote my first CGI project entirely in C, and I will surely never do that again. In three years of programming, almost every bug I had was caused by malloc's or array allocations that were too short, or string or array manipulations that were off by one or ran off the end. I've never had these problems with Perl.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
...have you ever noticed how often Microsoft takes a good idea and does the wrong thing with it?
As a multiplatform developer, I understand the value of a useful, portable class library. On the other hand, though, it has also made me appreciate the extra cost that it can add - especially when you're only targeting a single platform.
If I want to write a Windows-only app (say what you will, but that's what most users want) what do I use? I have no interest in writing in (ugh!) C++. AWT is useless. Swing has most of the functionality, but at a terrible performance hit. User-draw widgets are slower, don't always have the expected behavior, and aren't forward compatible. (Luke, use the native widgets Luke.)
If MS had released a library of windows-specific Java libraries (com.ms.whatever) with JNI compliant natives, then Joe-the-Java-developer could write code to fully leverage windows functionality and look-and-feel. Some clever hacker could have even taken a subset of the native methods and written implementations for [insert your favorite GUI toolkit].
Instead, they use the idea to try and crush the competition by corrupting or stealing the language.
*SIGH*
Drinking will help us plan!
Folks,
It doesn't matter that the injunction was lifted. If you program in any language, you spend weeks, months or even years before you can produce high quality code. Learning a computer language is a major investment, that you wouldn't make if you know this computer language will likely not exist in the near future.
Regardless of Microsofts marketing muscle, if their incompatible version of Java is likely to disappear in the near future (even if that means a year or two), they won't get anyone outside Redmont to write decent applications with it. I'm not worried about some throw away applets for some lame web pages that will only work under IE5. Remember that Windows doesn't dominate the desktop because of ActiveX but because of the "Big Applications" like Office, Photoshop, AutoCad and all these Games. Notice that only some of these are made by Microsoft!
If SUN is eventually going to win this case (and that's what the article suggests), MS Java is finished. Not in two years, but for all practical purposes now.