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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!"
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
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.:))
...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.