Fair enough, but that is a very specialised use. Almost all scientific apps use the equivalent of C or Java doubles for calculation. Almost no serious high-performance scientific calculation would use arbitrary precision mathematics. The only use I can think of is numerical research.
I don't think it is useful to pick one very specialised case where Kaffe has improved speed and ignore the general case where it seriously lags. Something like Linpack is a better benchmark, which uses fixed precision floating point (although my personal interest is in molecular modelling). Linpack shows Sun's VM to be within 10-20% of C/C++, and Kaffe way behind (around half the speed). This is quite an achievement for an OS JVM, but too slow to be an adequate replacement for C in general numerical work, which is what I want to use Java for.
OK, you are right about the SCSL - it is not truly open source.
But, I am afraid my honest reaction is 'so what?'
I simply don't feel the need to stick to the high principles of open source all the time. I base the software and systems I use on decades of experience of dealing with companies. I have dealt with both Sun and Microsoft over a very long time, and Sun has always been trustworthy, and has donated huge amounts of source code (under licenses you would probably approve of) to developers. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been problematic, and I find comparisons between Sun and Microsoft to be simplistic and mistaken.
We all make compromises. You are probably using an open source system, but it is running on a proprietary processor in proprietary hardware. However, with those aspects you have choice. Same with Java. Sun's code may be non-GPL (or any other OSI license), but Java is available from many vendors - you have a choice. My view is that not using it because of license objections is to seriously restrict your choice of development language without much reason. I'm sure you have a different view!
I have no idea what you mean by this. Nor do funny mobile phones.
I don't understand why you call these 'funny'. They are going to be the major client interface to the internet and applications.
As for HP, well, did they actually implement the whole jre, or did they do the binaries and get the class libraries from Sun ?
They implemented the binaries clean-room and used Sun's class library source. However, Sun allows full open source implementations:
http://news.osdir.com/article491.html
"The current java license allows *anyone* to create a clean-room, open-source, royalty-free version of java. So, why hasn't IBM (for example) made their java implementation open source? Why does it have to be Sun?"
What I don't understand is why you are asking these questions on Slashdot, as the answers are easily available to anyone with a web browser and access to Google?
No. It doesn't mean what you think it means. To your average manager, describing Java as 'free' makes perfect sense, as they pay nothing for it. The average developer or manager does not care what 'free' means in the elite high temples of the open source gurus. Their business need pay nothing for Java and they can re-distribute for free with their applications. What else could they possibly want? There are no practical restrictions on what they realistically want to use it for. That is all they need to know. They don't want to read the fine print of the GPL. If they did read the fine print of the GPL, they would be as scared of it as they would be of any Sun license.
Nonsense. Neither SCSL nor BCL have ever been approved by OSI. They are clearly not open source. Read them, read the open source definition, and it should be obvious that OSI would never approve them as open source.
"Although the OSI promotes the free redistribution of software with access to both source and compiled code, it does not discriminate against proprietary ventures. OSI-approved licenses include BSD, GPL and X11, and the IPL (IBM Public License), the MPL (Mozilla PublicLicense), SCSL (Sun Community Source License) and APSL (Apple Public Source License)."
Kaffe can use the excellent state-of-the-art GNU MP bignum library for javax.math. Hot-spot is no match for it. By far.
I don't believe a word of this. Hot-spot is so good it can use parallel architectures like MMX to optimise math, and even optimise machine code instruction order. See Kaffe/Hotspot independent benchmarks below.
By a factor of 1000 and larger on really big numbers, afair from mailing list reports. That's simply because the GPLd code is so much better in that area than anything Sun has come up with so far. Be happy and enjoy it.
This is total rubbish. Here is proof:
http://www.shudo.net/jit/perf/
This is a respected series of benchmarks. On the tests it is actually capable of running, Kaffe rarely equals anything like Sun or IBM Java performance.
Nonsense. (1) there is the compatibility testing
Is there? Really? Have you ever seen the results of a compatiblity test published anywhere so that they can be independently verified? Have you ever been able to verify those claims? Have you ever seen the tests?
Why should I care? I'm not writing a Java VM!
What I get as a consumer is 'Java' VMs that run my code flawlessly. They do. If you want to test Sun's Java, I have provided a compatibility test link below.
Sure. I'd like to see proof that Sun's VM passes all the tests. Show it to me, please.:)
The proof is here:
http://java.sun.com/j2ee/compatibility.html
These are implementations that have passed the J2EE test suite.
If you want to prove it to yourself. Here is the website for some test suites:
People don't buy Microsoft because they're forced to...they buy it because they have CHOSEN to
Total nonsense. Almost no-one chooses the OS on a PC. You purchase a PC, and 99% of the time you get Windows on it. It has reached a stage that very few know there is any alternative.
Everything works, and I like that. I LIKE the fact that everything I need works on one machine without any problems. You refer to this feature as if its bad!
I don't, because your 'everything works' world is imaginary. Real users of Windows have to deal with its many faults - viruses, worms, security failures, crashes... it is a poor system that has sneaked into dominance through business deals and shady practices (bundling)-these pratices are well documented.
Besides, you don't scream "Monopoly" because some PS2 game isn't available on gamecube...so why should this be any different? PS2 has the largest share of the console market...how come they aren't getting railed on?
Read this carefully. It is very simple: Largest share is not the same as monopoly position.
Monopoly position is where you are in a position to control prices in the market, as MS does with Office and Windows.
PS2 is not in a market position to control prices or leverage other markets.
What part of this simple explanation don't you understand?
Benjamin Franklin said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Exactly my point. Those who give up the liberty of freedom to obtain a little temporary safety and convenience of a monopoly supplier....
Fortunately wise governments now protect their citizens, and gives them what they, and the market need, not what they deserve.
Those of the SCSL, the BCL, and similarly funny non-free software licenses used for Java technology, for example.
Ah, the ones approved by the Open Source Initiative? Hence your description of them as 'funny non-free' is factually incorrect.
Those licences are for Sun's source code. There is no barrier to GPLed implementations.
There is a difference here: there are people who prefer to beg, and there are people who don't care about Sun any more and hack on a better platform. I'm part of the latter group.
I'm part of a third group - those who don't care for the self-indulgence of many open sourcers and are happy to make good use of one of the most powerful development platforms.
That certainly depends on what you do. On some applications (scientific, crypto, nestedvm,...) Kaffe outperforms Sun's hotspot by a factor of 20 or more.
That would be neat, as I have benchmarked Sun's VM as equal to the speed of GCC for many scientific/math uses. So, you are claiming that Kaffe is 20x faster than GCC? That would be quite an achievement. In fact, I would call it impossible.
Compatibility is a huge marketing bogosity in the Java space, without anything to back up the claims.
Nonsense. (1) there is the compatibility testing, (2) there is practical experience. I can write full-featured server and client apps on Sun's VM on Windows, and deploy using IBM's VM on Linux. No problems at all. Compatibility is absolutely vital.
non-transparent compatibility claims without proof from non-free runtimes
The compatibility has to be proven, or else it is not Java.
Free software is one thing, it has to do with freedom, especially the freedom of the user, every user.
No it doesn't, unless there is some specialised meaning that has been adopted by some developers.
To most people, 'Free' means zero financial cost. If you don't mean what most people mean, use another word.
If you are talking about non-free OSS software, Free/OpenSource is not correct, and it's misleading the reader.
I was talking about open source ('look, here is the source code!') software that costs nothing. Using the English language, that is free, open source. If you have more specific terms, use those (e.g. GPL, BSD license etc.).
The average company couldnt afford to do this I agreed. But the good thing about OSS is that if someone drops the ball, someone else can pick it up and run with it.
How did you come up with this definition of competition? Maybe that's your definition, but it certainly has no basis in reality.
It is an ideal. It is something you work towards. Just because there will always be some barriers to a free market and competition does not mean that efforts to remove barriers should cease.
1. Whether a customer realizes there is an alternative or not is NOT any company's or any government's responsibility.
In monopoly situations, it is.
So what if microsoft bundles free software with their operating system! If you don't like the software, don't use it. If you don't like these bundling tactics, don't buy their operating system. Period! Why is it that the government has to regulate what we can regulate ourselves?
This is a hopelessly naive point of view! It might make some kind of sense if Windows was not the de-facto standard for desktop operating systems. However, because it is on the vast majority of desktops, companies buy it and PC manufacturers pre-install it because most new users want compatibility. Many companies are migrating away, but it will be a long time before alternative Desktop OSes have an impact. For the average home PC user who wants to use average software and games there is no alternative. The barrier to not using windows is considerable, and this gives Microsoft an unfair leverage in dominating other markets.
The reason why governments work to prevent this is because without effective competition there is no barrier to arbitrary pricing. After a sufficient period of bundling media player, and so eliminating effective competition, Microsoft would be in a position to distribute various types of media (music, video), and price them higher because it controls the method of distribution. They would be using a monopoly in one area (Desktop OSes) to manipulate another area (Media software sales and media distribution). In most capitalist countries, this is illegal.
Not at all. In the OSS situation, you can pay someone to maintain the OSS code base for you.
I don't believe the average company could afford to pay the number of developers who would be needed to maintain the code base for a major development language. This is all very well in principle, but in reality it is not an option.
Yes, but not every user installs the same JRE. Last time I installed OpenOffice I had to get my own.
Java is no different from any other set of run-time libraries. If Open Office specifies JRE 1.4.2 or later, that is what you will need, but there are no optional parts - that JRE will contain all the libraries.
Their products weren't good enough (or better enough to justify switching to them) to compete in the free market, so they ask big government to stifle their competition (Microsoft). Now THAT'S pretty damn anti-competetive if you ask me.
No. When products are bundled there are two issues: (1) Do customers realise there is an alternative? (2) Do they have enough problems to want to switch?
With IE, there are enough problems that significant numbers of people are switching. But this is not a sign that things are fair. It shows that a competing product has to be significantly better than the bundled product.
Competition is when there is NO barrier to using products of equal quality. Bundling introduces such a barrier, especially on a system used by almost everyone such as Windows.
Yeah. And one would think that after 10 years of trying to put up pressure on Sun to do something they repeatedly said that they don't want to do, people would finally learn to stop wasting their breath and just go ahead and try to create something better instead of begging to be released of their shackles.
What shackles? No-one is stopping the OS community from producing a quality Java implementation! Why all the pressure to get hold of Sun's code? There are fully-compatible implementations which do not use Sun's code (e.g. HP Java). The OS community managed to make a high quality C++ implementation without having to be given all the source code - what is stopping them doing the same with Java?
Fortunately, in increasing numbers, they do now. See Mono, see GNU Classpath, see gcj, and see Kaffe.
Have you used these? Kaffe has always been slow and problematic. The GNU VM is slow and incompatible. GNU Classpath is incomplete, and Mono doesn't have a compatible modern Java.
because Sun made sure only the sun JRE is allowed to be called Java.
This is common Slashdot FUD, and is nonsense. A JRE can be called Java if it passes the compatibility tests. For example, HPs Java has no sun source code in, yet is called Java. There are other clean-room Java implementations that are also called Java - because they passed the tests.
And "wide Range" is probably something miniscule like four.
Windows 3.1 (IBM's 16-bit version), Win95/98/ME/XP/2000, Linux(RedHat/Debian), Solaris(2.6-2.9), Apple(OS 9/OS X), PalmOS, WinCE, DOS, Mobile phones...
except that Debian can't redistribute the Java packages
I think it is more that Debian won't redistribute the Java packages. Other Linux distros do. I like Debian, and their philosophy, but this is a Debian issue more than a Java issue.
let's curse ourselves for not being ready for things of this nature - and put more emphasis on the GNU java classes and an open-source JRE and JDK implementation (and maybe even improvements to GCJ as well) - and then we'll have solved two problems with one stone.
Well said. All this pressure for Sun to open source Java is in reality pressure for Sun to open source their source for their Java implementation. There is nothing to stop a OS version of Java being developed.
If you are talking about the GPL, the GPL almost doesn't control the way you use the software. It controls the way you share it. Gives you all the freedom as a user, and takes some away as a distributor, compared to public domain. If you abuse your distribution rights, you can lose your usage rights, too.
Use was only one of the aspects mentioned. There was also copyright and politics. Also, FOSS is more than just the GPL!
At the moment, Sun's big competitors like Red Hat refuse to ship Sun's non-free Java.
Nonsense. RedHat has been shipping Java as part of their Enterprise Linux for a long time. Other Linux distributions, such as SuSE have also been shipping with Java as part of their Linux products.
Proprietary software means software that someone can make copyright or patent claims on in such a way as to get the state to use force to prevent you from using or sharing the software in certain ways. That's politics.
That also describes the licensing of many FOSS projects.
When you use proprietary software, you have to be concerned with politics; only Free Software takes away political concerns.
This is totally wrong. There are major political concerns with Free Software. Sure, I happen to agree with the politics....
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to believe it. You can go ahead and check it out yourself by getting the simple BigInteger benchmark from i2p at http://dev.i2p.net/javadoc/net/i2p/util/NativeBigI nteger.html
Fair enough, but that is a very specialised use. Almost all scientific apps use the equivalent of C or Java doubles for calculation. Almost no serious high-performance scientific calculation would use arbitrary precision mathematics. The only use I can think of is numerical research.
I don't think it is useful to pick one very specialised case where Kaffe has improved speed and ignore the general case where it seriously lags. Something like Linpack is a better benchmark, which uses fixed precision floating point (although my personal interest is in molecular modelling). Linpack shows Sun's VM to be within 10-20% of C/C++, and Kaffe way behind (around half the speed). This is quite an achievement for an OS JVM, but too slow to be an adequate replacement for C in general numerical work, which is what I want to use Java for.
OK, you are right about the SCSL - it is not truly open source.
But, I am afraid my honest reaction is 'so what?'
I simply don't feel the need to stick to the high principles of open source all the time. I base the software and systems I use on decades of experience of dealing with companies. I have dealt with both Sun and Microsoft over a very long time, and Sun has always been trustworthy, and has donated huge amounts of source code (under licenses you would probably approve of) to developers. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been problematic, and I find comparisons between Sun and Microsoft to be simplistic and mistaken.
We all make compromises. You are probably using an open source system, but it is running on a proprietary processor in proprietary hardware. However, with those aspects you have choice. Same with Java. Sun's code may be non-GPL (or any other OSI license), but Java is available from many vendors - you have a choice. My view is that not using it because of license objections is to seriously restrict your choice of development language without much reason. I'm sure you have a different view!
Hmmm... Name one I can install on FreeBSD.
i ndex.ht ml
FreeBSD Java:
http://www.eyesbeyond.com/freebsddom/java/
Heck, just name one I can run on Windows or Linux.
Windows:
Sun's JRE: www.java.net
IBM's JRE (on IBM's PCs) - www.ibm.com
Check BEA WebLogic for Windows: www.weblogic.com
Linux:
Sun's JRE: www.java.net
IBM's JRE: www.ibm.com
BEA (as above).
Blackdown: www.blackdown.org
No, dying superserver environments don't count.
I have no idea what you mean by this.
Nor do funny mobile phones.
I don't understand why you call these 'funny'. They are going to be the major client interface to the internet and applications.
As for HP, well, did they actually implement the whole jre, or did they do the binaries and get the class libraries from Sun ?
They implemented the binaries clean-room and used Sun's class library source. However, Sun allows full open source implementations:
http://news.osdir.com/article491.html
"The current java license allows *anyone* to create a clean-room, open-source, royalty-free version of java. So, why hasn't IBM (for example) made their java implementation open source? Why does it have to be Sun?"
What I don't understand is why you are asking these questions on Slashdot, as the answers are easily available to anyone with a web browser and access to Google?
It doesn't mean what you think it means.
No. It doesn't mean what you think it means. To your average manager, describing Java as 'free' makes perfect sense, as they pay nothing for it. The average developer or manager does not care what 'free' means in the elite high temples of the open source gurus. Their business need pay nothing for Java and they can re-distribute for free with their applications. What else could they possibly want? There are no practical restrictions on what they realistically want to use it for. That is all they need to know. They don't want to read the fine print of the GPL. If they did read the fine print of the GPL, they would be as scared of it as they would be of any Sun license.
Nonsense. Neither SCSL nor BCL have ever been approved by OSI. They are clearly not open source. Read them, read the open source definition, and it should be obvious that OSI would never approve them as open source.
m /m sg00035.html:
:)
/ JC Ptools/
http://www.mail-archive.com/kmself@ix.netcom.co
"Although the OSI promotes the free redistribution of software with access to both source and compiled code, it does not discriminate against proprietary ventures. OSI-approved licenses include BSD, GPL and X11, and the IPL (IBM Public License), the MPL (Mozilla PublicLicense), SCSL (Sun Community Source License) and APSL (Apple Public Source License)."
Kaffe can use the excellent state-of-the-art GNU MP bignum library for javax.math. Hot-spot is no match for it. By far.
I don't believe a word of this. Hot-spot is so good it can use parallel architectures like MMX to optimise math, and even optimise machine code instruction order. See Kaffe/Hotspot independent benchmarks below.
By a factor of 1000 and larger on really big numbers, afair from mailing list reports. That's simply because the GPLd code is so much better in that area than anything Sun has come up with so far. Be happy and enjoy it.
This is total rubbish. Here is proof:
http://www.shudo.net/jit/perf/
This is a respected series of benchmarks. On the tests it is actually capable of running, Kaffe rarely equals anything like Sun or IBM Java performance.
Nonsense. (1) there is the compatibility testing
Is there? Really? Have you ever seen the results of a compatiblity test published anywhere so that they can be independently verified? Have you ever been able to verify those claims? Have you ever seen the tests?
Why should I care? I'm not writing a Java VM!
What I get as a consumer is 'Java' VMs that run my code flawlessly. They do. If you want to test Sun's Java, I have provided a compatibility test link below.
Sure. I'd like to see proof that Sun's VM passes all the tests. Show it to me, please.
The proof is here:
http://java.sun.com/j2ee/compatibility.html
These are implementations that have passed the J2EE test suite.
If you want to prove it to yourself. Here is the website for some test suites:
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles
People don't buy Microsoft because they're forced to...they buy it because they have CHOSEN to
Total nonsense. Almost no-one chooses the OS on a PC. You purchase a PC, and 99% of the time you get Windows on it. It has reached a stage that very few know there is any alternative.
Everything works, and I like that. I LIKE the fact that everything I need works on one machine without any problems. You refer to this feature as if its bad!
I don't, because your 'everything works' world is imaginary. Real users of Windows have to deal with its many faults - viruses, worms, security failures, crashes... it is a poor system that has sneaked into dominance through business deals and shady practices (bundling)-these pratices are well documented.
Besides, you don't scream "Monopoly" because some PS2 game isn't available on gamecube...so why should this be any different? PS2 has the largest share of the console market...how come they aren't getting railed on?
Read this carefully. It is very simple:
Largest share is not the same as monopoly position.
Monopoly position is where you are in a position to control prices in the market, as MS does with Office and Windows.
PS2 is not in a market position to control prices or leverage other markets.
What part of this simple explanation don't you understand?
Benjamin Franklin said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Exactly my point. Those who give up the liberty of freedom to obtain a little temporary safety and convenience of a monopoly supplier....
Fortunately wise governments now protect their citizens, and gives them what they, and the market need, not what they deserve.
Those of the SCSL, the BCL, and similarly funny non-free software licenses used for Java technology, for example.
...) Kaffe outperforms Sun's hotspot by a factor of 20 or more.
Ah, the ones approved by the Open Source Initiative? Hence your description of them as 'funny non-free' is factually incorrect.
Those licences are for Sun's source code. There is no barrier to GPLed implementations.
There is a difference here: there are people who prefer to beg, and there are people who don't care about Sun any more and hack on a better platform. I'm part of the latter group.
I'm part of a third group - those who don't care for the self-indulgence of many open sourcers and are happy to make good use of one of the most powerful development platforms.
That certainly depends on what you do. On some applications (scientific, crypto, nestedvm,
That would be neat, as I have benchmarked Sun's VM as equal to the speed of GCC for many scientific/math uses. So, you are claiming that Kaffe is 20x faster than GCC? That would be quite an achievement. In fact, I would call it impossible.
Compatibility is a huge marketing bogosity in the Java space, without anything to back up the claims.
Nonsense. (1) there is the compatibility testing, (2) there is practical experience. I can write full-featured server and client apps on Sun's VM on Windows, and deploy using IBM's VM on Linux. No problems at all. Compatibility is absolutely vital.
non-transparent compatibility claims without proof from non-free runtimes
The compatibility has to be proven, or else it is not Java.
Mobiles phones huh? Try reading this news item by Carmack on that.
Yeah, sure - I'll take one person's comment as typical experience of an entire developer community!
But, this is irrelevant. The relative optimisation of JREs on different platform has no bearing on the completeness of the libraries or JREs.
Free software is one thing, it has to do with freedom, especially the freedom of the user, every user.
No it doesn't, unless there is some specialised meaning that has been adopted by some developers.
To most people, 'Free' means zero financial cost. If you don't mean what most people mean, use another word.
If you are talking about non-free OSS software, Free/OpenSource is not correct, and it's misleading the reader.
I was talking about open source ('look, here is the source code!') software that costs nothing. Using the English language, that is free, open source. If you have more specific terms, use those (e.g. GPL, BSD license etc.).
The average company couldnt afford to do this I agreed. But the good thing about OSS is that if someone drops the ball, someone else can pick it up and run with it.
This is a very good point.
How did you come up with this definition of competition? Maybe that's your definition, but it certainly has no basis in reality.
It is an ideal. It is something you work towards. Just because there will always be some barriers to a free market and competition does not mean that efforts to remove barriers should cease.
1. Whether a customer realizes there is an alternative or not is NOT any company's or any government's responsibility.
In monopoly situations, it is.
So what if microsoft bundles free software with their operating system! If you don't like the software, don't use it. If you don't like these bundling tactics, don't buy their operating system. Period! Why is it that the government has to regulate what we can regulate ourselves?
This is a hopelessly naive point of view! It might make some kind of sense if Windows was not the de-facto standard for desktop operating systems. However, because it is on the vast majority of desktops, companies buy it and PC manufacturers pre-install it because most new users want compatibility. Many companies are migrating away, but it will be a long time before alternative Desktop OSes have an impact. For the average home PC user who wants to use average software and games there is no alternative. The barrier to not using windows is considerable, and this gives Microsoft an unfair leverage in dominating other markets.
The reason why governments work to prevent this is because without effective competition there is no barrier to arbitrary pricing. After a sufficient period of bundling media player, and so eliminating effective competition, Microsoft would be in a position to distribute various types of media (music, video), and price them higher because it controls the method of distribution. They would be using a monopoly in one area (Desktop OSes) to manipulate another area (Media software sales and media distribution). In most capitalist countries, this is illegal.
Not at all. In the OSS situation, you can pay someone to maintain the OSS code base for you.
I don't believe the average company could afford to pay the number of developers who would be needed to maintain the code base for a major development language. This is all very well in principle, but in reality it is not an option.
Yes, but not every user installs the same JRE. Last time I installed OpenOffice I had to get my own.
Java is no different from any other set of run-time libraries. If Open Office specifies JRE 1.4.2 or later, that is what you will need, but there are no optional parts - that JRE will contain all the libraries.
Their products weren't good enough (or better enough to justify switching to them) to compete in the free market, so they ask big government to stifle their competition (Microsoft). Now THAT'S pretty damn anti-competetive if you ask me.
No. When products are bundled there are two issues:
(1) Do customers realise there is an alternative?
(2) Do they have enough problems to want to switch?
With IE, there are enough problems that significant numbers of people are switching. But this is not a sign that things are fair. It shows that a competing product has to be significantly better than the bundled product.
Competition is when there is NO barrier to using products of equal quality. Bundling introduces such a barrier, especially on a system used by almost everyone such as Windows.
Yes, but Java has some peculiar encumbrances in that it requires installation of additional components that are up to the user
Such as? The JRE includes the full libraries.
You are misinformed. RedHat Enterprise does ship Sun's Java. There was an agreement in May 2003 for RedHat to do this.
Sorry - it DID ship Sun's Java. It is now IBM's, which is, of course, compatible.
Yeah. And one would think that after 10 years of trying to put up pressure on Sun to do something they repeatedly said that they don't want to do, people would finally learn to stop wasting their breath and just go ahead and try to create something better instead of begging to be released of their shackles.
What shackles? No-one is stopping the OS community from producing a quality Java implementation! Why all the pressure to get hold of Sun's code? There are fully-compatible implementations which do not use Sun's code (e.g. HP Java). The OS community managed to make a high quality C++ implementation without having to be given all the source code - what is stopping them doing the same with Java?
Fortunately, in increasing numbers, they do now. See Mono, see GNU Classpath, see gcj, and see Kaffe.
Have you used these? Kaffe has always been slow and problematic. The GNU VM is slow and incompatible. GNU Classpath is incomplete, and Mono doesn't have a compatible modern Java.
because Sun made sure only the sun JRE is allowed to be called Java.
This is common Slashdot FUD, and is nonsense. A JRE can be called Java if it passes the compatibility tests. For example, HPs Java has no sun source code in, yet is called Java. There are other clean-room Java implementations that are also called Java - because they passed the tests.
And "wide Range" is probably something miniscule like four.
Windows 3.1 (IBM's 16-bit version), Win95/98/ME/XP/2000, Linux(RedHat/Debian), Solaris(2.6-2.9), Apple(OS 9/OS X), PalmOS, WinCE, DOS, Mobile phones...
except that Debian can't redistribute the Java packages
I think it is more that Debian won't redistribute the Java packages. Other Linux distros do. I like Debian, and their philosophy, but this is a Debian issue more than a Java issue.
let's curse ourselves for not being ready for things of this nature - and put more emphasis on the GNU java classes and an open-source JRE and JDK implementation (and maybe even improvements to GCJ as well) - and then we'll have solved two problems with one stone.
Well said. All this pressure for Sun to open source Java is in reality pressure for Sun to open source their source for their Java implementation. There is nothing to stop a OS version of Java being developed.
If you are talking about the GPL, the GPL almost doesn't control the way you use the software. It controls the way you share it. Gives you all the freedom as a user, and takes some away as a distributor, compared to public domain. If you abuse your distribution rights, you can lose your usage rights, too.
Use was only one of the aspects mentioned. There was also copyright and politics. Also, FOSS is more than just the GPL!
Most of the time I think they just throw in random keywords hoping to get someone who will lie to their face.
J2EE (which is where most Java development is done) is a highly specific skillset, and not just a random keyword (like 'Java skills')
Not all JREs are alike, despite what you may hear.
Having used Java since it started, on a wide range of platforms, I can say that these days, all things labelled 'Java' JREs are indeed alike.
At the moment, Sun's big competitors like Red Hat refuse to ship Sun's non-free Java.
Nonsense. RedHat has been shipping Java as part of their Enterprise Linux for a long time. Other Linux distributions, such as SuSE have also been shipping with Java as part of their Linux products.
This is just anti-Sun FUD.
"What bollox. SUN permits redistribution of its JRE with applications."
No, it doesn't. I just had to distribute an app that relies on Java and had to read the EULA.
I have read the EULA. Where does it say you can't redistribute with Java applications?
Proprietary software means software that someone can make copyright or patent claims on in such a way as to get the state to use force to prevent you from using or sharing the software in certain ways. That's politics.
That also describes the licensing of many FOSS projects.
When you use proprietary software, you have to be concerned with politics; only Free Software takes away political concerns.
This is totally wrong. There are major political concerns with Free Software. Sure, I happen to agree with the politics....