Java on BeOS, supported by Sun
John Kenneth Grytten writes "Be and Sun have announced that they will be working together to bring Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition and PersonalJava to BeOs." They expect to have betas ready by the end of the year, with shipping versions going out 1Q 2000.
This isn't to knock the Blackdown team -- they have done a terrific job. But doing such a port really is a lot of work, maybe too much for a closed porting team. If we could open up the porting process and let those of us with different systems really bang on it, I'm sure things would be progressing much more rapidly.
Matt Welsh
I'm not aware that they have delivered on any of them. Have they actually
-- Slashdot sucks.
Don't forget that Sun think that they're in a difficult position because of the Linux vs Solaris issue, so inevitably there will be internal pressure from some of their divisions *not* to help out the Linux scene too much. In contrast, adding value to little ol' Be holds no danger for them.
In reality of course, assuming that they really make no money from Solaris as the rumours suggest, their best bet is probably to GPL the entirety of Solaris and to support all free operating systems equally on their nice hardware. Unfortunately, internal politics may not allow that --- the Solaris empires within Sun are far too deeply entrenched in the internal political mechanisms of the company. A pity.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra