Yah, this only works until one of them turns their eye or gun or tank or God's word or faith-based community or government or _fill_in_the_blank_ on you. Then what?
We have a large population of irrational, dangerous, and immoral people in the world--that's just reality. Religion and the fear of god keeps them in check at least some of the time. Imagine what these nuts would do if they weren't even constrained by Christianity and the fear of the almighty.
Until we figure out some better way of instilling morality in people who don't have it naturally, religion seems like a reasonable compromise. What we can do right now is to encourage people to move more towards the peaceful, tolerant, and socially responsible variants of Christianity.
Considering that I've been told by more than one Christian (true story here) that atheists do not have the capacity for morality
If you are rational and moral, you don't need the threat of a wrathful god--you only need that if you lack the capacity for morality. So, when Christians are behaving morally, there's a good chance it's not because they believe it but because they are utilitarian. When atheists behave morally, they do it because they consider it the right thing to do.
So, I'm glad that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and all the other religions keep the latent thieves, murderers, rapists, and frauds that are members of those religions at bay through fear. It makes my life safer and more pleasant, up to the point where those religious nuts go crusading or are trying to impose irrational and unfounded extensions of their religions on others.
As I mentioned in another thread, I think all these patent worries are just attempts to spread FUD and have no real basis in reality.
However, in general, I also think that applications like OpenOffice should be more componentized. Some of the Firefox extensions, for example, are probably infringing on patents, but Firefox itself is in the clear. Most of OpenOffice functionality should be provided like Firefox extensions. That's particularly true for Microsoft-compatibility, not because there is much real risk, but because it cuts down on the FUD.
Unfortunately, creating a robust extension system is hard in C/C++. Even Firefox only works as well as it does because most extensions are not native code.
If Microsoft wanted to slip Microsoft-proprietary code into an open source project, they'd have easier ways of doing it.
In the end, every open source project needs to know where its source code comes from (and almost all of them do), and it needs to get a legally clear license statement from its contributors. Should the code infringe copyrights or patents, the contributor may be liable, Novell in this case, in particular if they did so knowingly. And if it turns out that Microsoft hired Novell to put this code in, then the project is in the clear anyway.
Even if "bad code" gets into a project, it's not the end of the world. Should Microsoft assert a claim, the offending code would simply be removed and that would be the end of it.
All this hand-wringing over proprietary code is just supporting Microsoft's FUD strategy. Open source projects simply do not seem to be particularly vulnerable to patent claims in the real world; at worst, the infringing code is removed and the rest of the project goes on.
I'm afraid the only useability studies of SGML tools that I saw were not released to the public.
I'm not talking about the usability of SGML tools, I'm talking about the usability of the syntax itself. You claimed that its cumbersome syntax was chosen because people would often have to use it without tools. In order to use that justification, you really need to compare multiple different kinds of syntactic choices experimentally, and you actually have to have some sound criteria to compare it on. Even your observations ("in practice, we learned") are hardly convincing, given that, in practice, people have had no obvious problems with anonymous end tags for the last 30 years, and they continue to be used in almost every new language design other than the XML/HTML/SGML family.
I honestly don't know whether XML is objectively a "good" or "bad" design. My point is: neither do you, since that would take (1) a clear statement of what you're optimizing, and (2) clear experimental evaluations. I think it would be good both for the designers and users of the standard (and most other standards), as well as future standards designers, to keep that in mind.
Anyway, I do appreciate you taking the time to respond; you probably have had more than one unhappy customer.
Whether you're listening to an overpaid talking head on CNN, at the NYT, or "in the blogosphere", of course, the same mechanisms are at work about how these people make tradeoffs between money, popularity, access, and influence.
Diversify your blog reading and you'll get a better picture.
Apple maintains its own JDK that contain the Swing Look And Feel for the Macintosh. Since it's done by Apple itself, it should integrate well with the rest of the desktop.
It doesn't. First, it doesn't seem high priority to Apple. More importantly, there are things you can't fix at the toolkit level. If menu entries are just in the wrong place, the toolkit can't move them around. Native-like cross-platform support is intrinsically unachievable.
And that's a weak point. If you only knew what's possible to do with Swing... it's very flexible, you can do absolutely anything you want with the application.
I've been a Java developer almost since day one, and I have written plenty of Swing apps. Swing is very flexible, but that only contributes to the problems it has with cross-platform compatibility.
I think you should update your notions about Swing. It does have a nice integration in 1.6, it's actually possible to build applications that look exactly the same as the native environment, either on Windows, Unix, Mac or Linux.
I've been hearing that for every release since 1.2, and none have delivered. I'm using 1.5, and its desktop integration on Linux and MacOS still sucks. I have no reason to believe that 1.6 will be much better, and 1.6 cannot fix things that are inherently unfixable.
Java, Swing, and cross-platform toolkits are useful for some uses. The notion that they can integrate into a native desktop is ridiculous. At best, you could elevate Java to be the de-facto desktop standard in some environment, but the Linux community isn't going to go for that.
So, the redundancy of end tags in XML is there because, in practice, if you didn't have it, we had learned that our users had problems correcting their documents, and we knew that, in general, it was only rarely possible for software to give the users much help.
If you're going to make claims about the usability of something like XML, you better be able to back them up with user studies. Of course, there are none. But, in fact, you don't even seem to be clear on the concept of what you were optimizing: error rates? user throughput? speed? user satisfaction?
But the popularity of XML shows we can't have done all that badly, really;-)
Don't kid yourself: XML is popular because it's similar to HTML and because it was associated with some powerful organizations. If it had had to stand on its merits, it would have been laughed at.
Novell isn't paying Microsoft, Microsoft is making a net payment to Novell. They have simply structured it so that they can pretend that the deal involves Novell paying something to Microsoft, presumably so that they have some way of claiming that some open source entity is paying them something for their patents. This sort of claim may fool a few people, but I doubt it's going to hold much water in court.
But if Microsoft wants to make more of those contracts, if they send me $240m, I'll also gladly sign a contract that additionally licenses all their patents to me. Mr. Ballmer, are you listening?
The truly ironic bit is that Microsoft is not going to sue anyone over patents. Microsoft execs know that if they did this the various organizations that have a stake in the success of Linux (which is essentially everyone but Microsoft) would pay for a well-funded defense.
The reason is simpler: there is nothing to defend against. Open source users are not willfully infringing patents (they can't, according to the licenses). For non-willful infringement, the worst that is going to happen is that the application in question gets changed slightly or removed before the trial even starts. It would be a tough argument to get the court to go on with a trial after that given the circumstances.
The notion that open source users are at big risk of patent lawsuits from companies like Microsoft is nothing more than FUD.
Linux distributions probably do violate a few obscure patents that Microsoft holds. Mr. Ballmer--please let us know what they are so that we can work around them or challenge them in court.
The Novell deal, however, is not evidence of this, since it involved a net transfer of money from Microsoft to Novell. Furthermore, Novell publicly stated that they do not admit violating any Microsoft patents.
That's simply ridiculous. Theming is not a tradeoff with the kernel.
For Microsoft, it is, because they have release dates for the whole system every few years: if anything slips, the whole thing slips. And they pay for all of it out a total budget.
Open source or not, a project is a project, and requires project management. The same overhead is there regardless.
Open source is not "a project", it is thousands of independent projects whose dependencies are only defined by actual technical dependencies, not marketing, management, or release plans. In that system, the kernel is almost strictly upstream.
I know it's hard to grasp for some people, but open source really works differently from proprietary development in some important ways. Not all of it is necessarily better than Microsoft's "central planning" approach, but it is different.
Somehow, broadcasting several kW of power at 6.4MHz in every home does not seem like a good idea.
Actually, I like the idea of laser-powered transmission much better. Think about it: a 1kW laser with targeting hardware (including camera) in every room, probably all connected to the Internet. Can world domination be far behind?
While developing the Polyas (German) online voting system,
Why do those companies seem to attract the most incompetent developers?
Micromata invented a component
[sarcasm]What else did the "invent"? The mouse? Sex? Combining peanut butter and jelly?[/sarcasm] Using these kinds of inputs has a long tradition.
for secure PIN/password input via untrusted, insecure browsers.
It's not secure, not even close to it. And it has big usability problems. The approach is of some use in some applications, but for an on-line voting system, there are so much better things you can do, like send people a list of one-time passwords along with their voter registration card.
Of course, that presumes that on-line voting is even a good idea, which it isn't.
SWT fills this roll. I would agree with yor opinion of swing, but SWT gives you a very good abstraction of the non-cross platform GUI.
I don't find SWT integrates much better with Gnome than Swing. Ultimately, the only way right now to write a native, fully compliant desktop app is to write to desktop-specific language bindings, not an abstraction. It may be possible to do better in the future, but neither Swing nor SWT do.
but isn't better desktop integration and support one of the goals of java 1.6
There is no way that Swing can ever deliver decent desktop integration. GUI technologies are evolving fast and Gnome is keeping up, with all sorts of new functionality. Swing doesn't have most of the new functionality, and what it does doesn't even come close to integrating with the desktop.
heat up in the near future, with Mono steadily falling behind
Mono has a thriving community of Gnome developers and mature, completely up-to-date Gnome bindings. Java has neither of those. (Java has both Gnome and Qt bindings, but few people use them.)
That's my prediction - which is just that, a prediction.
I'd agree with your prediction if I saw a snowball's chance in hell that Swing could work reasonably well on the desktop--any desktop--but I don't. The desktop requires a dedication to non-cross platform tools, and that is still lacking in the Java community.
Note, incidentally, that Apple has also stopped further development of their desktop Java APIs; Java on Macintosh has been relegated to specialty apps that are never expected to fully integrate with the Mac, and I think it's the same on Linux.
I'm glad Sun took this step, and I'll be using Java a lot more than before, but I don't think it will ever catch up with Mono on the desktop.
But if you go to countries where people don't like to work for free -- they want SOMETHING for their time and to make their lives better -- you won't see a social drive to giving away their labor.
Where the hell do you get the idea that open source developers don't get paid, and paid handsomely? I suspect the average FOSS developer salary is significantly higher than industry average, because it takes dedication and skill to produce software that stands up to public scrutiny. And companies are willing to pay because it benefits them financially to do so.
The Indians will want nothing to do with it.
What the Indians want makes no difference; if the customers demand FOSS, they will have to deliver it, at the price that customers are willing to pay.
India has a history of thousands of years of being capitalists -- only recently did we really see socialism take over,
FOSS has nothing to do with socialism. FOSS is the natural endpoint in a free market in which the marginal cost is zero. FOSS is a free market response to the kind of abuses companies like Microsoft have been engaging in.
What you're saying is that Linux developers shouldn't be working on XGL and Beryl because doing so harms the kernel development.
Linux is free from many of those constraints because it's a distributed community project, not a single company commercial project. So, for Microsoft, the Vista kernel vs theming is a tradeoff, for Linux it isn't. Furthermore, XGL and Beryl are on-going projects, not anything that will hold up a release. And XGL is technology that actually makes a difference in many applications; it's not just frivolous visual effects.
Maybe Java will eventually compete with Mono, but right now, the two cover completely different domains: Java has excellent server-side and tools support, Mono has excellent native desktop support on Linux and Windows. I don't see any competition between them.
Quite to the contrary: Mono implements Java through IKVM and provides full C#/Java interoperability. With the GPL release of Sun Java, Mono's Java implementation can finally be 100% compatible with Sun Java, which will make Mono a more attractive choice on Linux, while also helping Java standardization. Everybody wins.
1. GPL doesn't require patent licenses to be granted.
If you redistribute code under the GPL, you give all the recipients rights to all the patents they need to actually use the code, and they can pass those rights on to others.
The early announcements suggest that this is a GPL release with a linking exception and no "dual license" scheme.
If that is so, it means that this is the real deal: a real open source project that is nevertheless usable by commercial users, and a legally binding commitment by Sun to make all their applicable Java-related patents available (and they have quite a number of them). Furthermore, it means that people can reuse bits and pieces of Sun's codebase under the terms of the GPL-with-linking-exception. And it removes the issue of what would happen to Java if Sun really hit hard times.
In the short term, this means much better availability and integration of Sun's Java implementation into Linux and other systems.
In the long term, it means that Sun's mediocre garbage collector, JIT, and toolkit bindings can be overhauled by combining Sun's Java library code (which has always been the biggest obstacle to compatibility) with systems like IKVM, Jikes, and gcj.
It won't solve any of the numerous technical problems Java has accumulated (at least not in the short term), but it puts Java back in the running.
I don't see why people get so upset about this. The agreement is pretty meaningless as far as open source is concerned. Microsoft probably made it in order (1) to spread FUD, (2) maybe actually get involved a little with Linux, and (3) to get cross licenses for Novell's patents. It's not like it's a huge amount of money for them, but it does help Novell, and Novell has actually contributed positively for the time being.
Leaving open access points for anything other than actually expressly providing open access should be a crime. In fact, there's a lot of nefarious activity that someone like that could be up to, and at the very least, it can cause problems for nearby users who may be connecting to the wrong access point.
My point was that Microsoft has likely hired all the developers it can get and/or manage efficiently, cutting "cosmetic" staff won't do anything to improve software quality.
I disagree. First, cosmetics papers over a lot of bad UI design, so by focusing on music and graphics, Microsoft can get away with stuff they couldn't get away with if their product had to succeed on its functionality alone. Second, these kinds of efforts send a clear signal to all employees what the company actually values. Third, these people need to be managed and their efforts need to get coordinated with software development, and that takes resources and creates risks, too.
Cutting staff that's not essential to software quality often does seem to improve software quality because the remaining people can better focus on making quality software.
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Yah, this only works until one of them turns their eye or gun or tank or God's word or faith-based community or government or _fill_in_the_blank_ on you. Then what?
We have a large population of irrational, dangerous, and immoral people in the world--that's just reality. Religion and the fear of god keeps them in check at least some of the time. Imagine what these nuts would do if they weren't even constrained by Christianity and the fear of the almighty.
Until we figure out some better way of instilling morality in people who don't have it naturally, religion seems like a reasonable compromise. What we can do right now is to encourage people to move more towards the peaceful, tolerant, and socially responsible variants of Christianity.
Considering that I've been told by more than one Christian (true story here) that atheists do not have the capacity for morality
If you are rational and moral, you don't need the threat of a wrathful god--you only need that if you lack the capacity for morality. So, when Christians are behaving morally, there's a good chance it's not because they believe it but because they are utilitarian. When atheists behave morally, they do it because they consider it the right thing to do.
So, I'm glad that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and all the other religions keep the latent thieves, murderers, rapists, and frauds that are members of those religions at bay through fear. It makes my life safer and more pleasant, up to the point where those religious nuts go crusading or are trying to impose irrational and unfounded extensions of their religions on others.
As I mentioned in another thread, I think all these patent worries are just attempts to spread FUD and have no real basis in reality.
However, in general, I also think that applications like OpenOffice should be more componentized. Some of the Firefox extensions, for example, are probably infringing on patents, but Firefox itself is in the clear. Most of OpenOffice functionality should be provided like Firefox extensions. That's particularly true for Microsoft-compatibility, not because there is much real risk, but because it cuts down on the FUD.
Unfortunately, creating a robust extension system is hard in C/C++. Even Firefox only works as well as it does because most extensions are not native code.
If Microsoft wanted to slip Microsoft-proprietary code into an open source project, they'd have easier ways of doing it.
In the end, every open source project needs to know where its source code comes from (and almost all of them do), and it needs to get a legally clear license statement from its contributors. Should the code infringe copyrights or patents, the contributor may be liable, Novell in this case, in particular if they did so knowingly. And if it turns out that Microsoft hired Novell to put this code in, then the project is in the clear anyway.
Even if "bad code" gets into a project, it's not the end of the world. Should Microsoft assert a claim, the offending code would simply be removed and that would be the end of it.
All this hand-wringing over proprietary code is just supporting Microsoft's FUD strategy. Open source projects simply do not seem to be particularly vulnerable to patent claims in the real world; at worst, the infringing code is removed and the rest of the project goes on.
I'm afraid the only useability studies of SGML tools that I saw were not released to the public.
I'm not talking about the usability of SGML tools, I'm talking about the usability of the syntax itself. You claimed that its cumbersome syntax was chosen because people would often have to use it without tools. In order to use that justification, you really need to compare multiple different kinds of syntactic choices experimentally, and you actually have to have some sound criteria to compare it on. Even your observations ("in practice, we learned") are hardly convincing, given that, in practice, people have had no obvious problems with anonymous end tags for the last 30 years, and they continue to be used in almost every new language design other than the XML/HTML/SGML family.
I honestly don't know whether XML is objectively a "good" or "bad" design. My point is: neither do you, since that would take (1) a clear statement of what you're optimizing, and (2) clear experimental evaluations. I think it would be good both for the designers and users of the standard (and most other standards), as well as future standards designers, to keep that in mind.
Anyway, I do appreciate you taking the time to respond; you probably have had more than one unhappy customer.
Whether you're listening to an overpaid talking head on CNN, at the NYT, or "in the blogosphere", of course, the same mechanisms are at work about how these people make tradeoffs between money, popularity, access, and influence.
Diversify your blog reading and you'll get a better picture.
Apple maintains its own JDK that contain the Swing Look And Feel for the Macintosh. Since it's done by Apple itself, it should integrate well with the rest of the desktop.
It doesn't. First, it doesn't seem high priority to Apple. More importantly, there are things you can't fix at the toolkit level. If menu entries are just in the wrong place, the toolkit can't move them around. Native-like cross-platform support is intrinsically unachievable.
And that's a weak point. If you only knew what's possible to do with Swing... it's very flexible, you can do absolutely anything you want with the application.
I've been a Java developer almost since day one, and I have written plenty of Swing apps. Swing is very flexible, but that only contributes to the problems it has with cross-platform compatibility.
I think you should update your notions about Swing. It does have a nice integration in 1.6, it's actually possible to build applications that look exactly the same as the native environment, either on Windows, Unix, Mac or Linux.
I've been hearing that for every release since 1.2, and none have delivered. I'm using 1.5, and its desktop integration on Linux and MacOS still sucks. I have no reason to believe that 1.6 will be much better, and 1.6 cannot fix things that are inherently unfixable.
Java, Swing, and cross-platform toolkits are useful for some uses. The notion that they can integrate into a native desktop is ridiculous. At best, you could elevate Java to be the de-facto desktop standard in some environment, but the Linux community isn't going to go for that.
So, the redundancy of end tags in XML is there because, in practice, if you didn't have it, we had learned that our users had problems correcting their documents, and we knew that, in general, it was only rarely possible for software to give the users much help.
;-)
If you're going to make claims about the usability of something like XML, you better be able to back them up with user studies. Of course, there are none. But, in fact, you don't even seem to be clear on the concept of what you were optimizing: error rates? user throughput? speed? user satisfaction?
But the popularity of XML shows we can't have done all that badly, really
Don't kid yourself: XML is popular because it's similar to HTML and because it was associated with some powerful organizations. If it had had to stand on its merits, it would have been laughed at.
Novell isn't paying Microsoft, Microsoft is making a net payment to Novell. They have simply structured it so that they can pretend that the deal involves Novell paying something to Microsoft, presumably so that they have some way of claiming that some open source entity is paying them something for their patents. This sort of claim may fool a few people, but I doubt it's going to hold much water in court.
But if Microsoft wants to make more of those contracts, if they send me $240m, I'll also gladly sign a contract that additionally licenses all their patents to me. Mr. Ballmer, are you listening?
The truly ironic bit is that Microsoft is not going to sue anyone over patents. Microsoft execs know that if they did this the various organizations that have a stake in the success of Linux (which is essentially everyone but Microsoft) would pay for a well-funded defense.
The reason is simpler: there is nothing to defend against. Open source users are not willfully infringing patents (they can't, according to the licenses). For non-willful infringement, the worst that is going to happen is that the application in question gets changed slightly or removed before the trial even starts. It would be a tough argument to get the court to go on with a trial after that given the circumstances.
The notion that open source users are at big risk of patent lawsuits from companies like Microsoft is nothing more than FUD.
Linux distributions probably do violate a few obscure patents that Microsoft holds. Mr. Ballmer--please let us know what they are so that we can work around them or challenge them in court.
The Novell deal, however, is not evidence of this, since it involved a net transfer of money from Microsoft to Novell. Furthermore, Novell publicly stated that they do not admit violating any Microsoft patents.
That's simply ridiculous. Theming is not a tradeoff with the kernel.
For Microsoft, it is, because they have release dates for the whole system every few years: if anything slips, the whole thing slips. And they pay for all of it out a total budget.
Open source or not, a project is a project, and requires project management. The same overhead is there regardless.
Open source is not "a project", it is thousands of independent projects whose dependencies are only defined by actual technical dependencies, not marketing, management, or release plans. In that system, the kernel is almost strictly upstream.
I know it's hard to grasp for some people, but open source really works differently from proprietary development in some important ways. Not all of it is necessarily better than Microsoft's "central planning" approach, but it is different.
Somehow, broadcasting several kW of power at 6.4MHz in every home does not seem like a good idea.
Actually, I like the idea of laser-powered transmission much better. Think about it: a 1kW laser with targeting hardware (including camera) in every room, probably all connected to the Internet. Can world domination be far behind?
While developing the Polyas (German) online voting system,
Why do those companies seem to attract the most incompetent developers?
Micromata invented a component
[sarcasm]What else did the "invent"? The mouse? Sex? Combining peanut butter and jelly?[/sarcasm] Using these kinds of inputs has a long tradition.
for secure PIN/password input via untrusted, insecure browsers.
It's not secure, not even close to it. And it has big usability problems. The approach is of some use in some applications, but for an on-line voting system, there are so much better things you can do, like send people a list of one-time passwords along with their voter registration card.
Of course, that presumes that on-line voting is even a good idea, which it isn't.
SWT fills this roll. I would agree with yor opinion of swing, but SWT gives you a very good abstraction of the non-cross platform GUI.
I don't find SWT integrates much better with Gnome than Swing. Ultimately, the only way right now to write a native, fully compliant desktop app is to write to desktop-specific language bindings, not an abstraction. It may be possible to do better in the future, but neither Swing nor SWT do.
but isn't better desktop integration and support one of the goals of java 1.6
There is no way that Swing can ever deliver decent desktop integration. GUI technologies are evolving fast and Gnome is keeping up, with all sorts of new functionality. Swing doesn't have most of the new functionality, and what it does doesn't even come close to integrating with the desktop.
heat up in the near future, with Mono steadily falling behind
Mono has a thriving community of Gnome developers and mature, completely up-to-date Gnome bindings. Java has neither of those. (Java has both Gnome and Qt bindings, but few people use them.)
That's my prediction - which is just that, a prediction.
I'd agree with your prediction if I saw a snowball's chance in hell that Swing could work reasonably well on the desktop--any desktop--but I don't. The desktop requires a dedication to non-cross platform tools, and that is still lacking in the Java community.
Note, incidentally, that Apple has also stopped further development of their desktop Java APIs; Java on Macintosh has been relegated to specialty apps that are never expected to fully integrate with the Mac, and I think it's the same on Linux.
I'm glad Sun took this step, and I'll be using Java a lot more than before, but I don't think it will ever catch up with Mono on the desktop.
But if you go to countries where people don't like to work for free -- they want SOMETHING for their time and to make their lives better -- you won't see a social drive to giving away their labor.
Where the hell do you get the idea that open source developers don't get paid, and paid handsomely? I suspect the average FOSS developer salary is significantly higher than industry average, because it takes dedication and skill to produce software that stands up to public scrutiny. And companies are willing to pay because it benefits them financially to do so.
The Indians will want nothing to do with it.
What the Indians want makes no difference; if the customers demand FOSS, they will have to deliver it, at the price that customers are willing to pay.
India has a history of thousands of years of being capitalists -- only recently did we really see socialism take over,
FOSS has nothing to do with socialism. FOSS is the natural endpoint in a free market in which the marginal cost is zero. FOSS is a free market response to the kind of abuses companies like Microsoft have been engaging in.
What you're saying is that Linux developers shouldn't be working on XGL and Beryl because doing so harms the kernel development.
Linux is free from many of those constraints because it's a distributed community project, not a single company commercial project. So, for Microsoft, the Vista kernel vs theming is a tradeoff, for Linux it isn't. Furthermore, XGL and Beryl are on-going projects, not anything that will hold up a release. And XGL is technology that actually makes a difference in many applications; it's not just frivolous visual effects.
I don't think the Mono folks are rejoicing
Maybe Java will eventually compete with Mono, but right now, the two cover completely different domains: Java has excellent server-side and tools support, Mono has excellent native desktop support on Linux and Windows. I don't see any competition between them.
Quite to the contrary: Mono implements Java through IKVM and provides full C#/Java interoperability. With the GPL release of Sun Java, Mono's Java implementation can finally be 100% compatible with Sun Java, which will make Mono a more attractive choice on Linux, while also helping Java standardization. Everybody wins.
1. GPL doesn't require patent licenses to be granted.
If you redistribute code under the GPL, you give all the recipients rights to all the patents they need to actually use the code, and they can pass those rights on to others.
The early announcements suggest that this is a GPL release with a linking exception and no "dual license" scheme.
If that is so, it means that this is the real deal: a real open source project that is nevertheless usable by commercial users, and a legally binding commitment by Sun to make all their applicable Java-related patents available (and they have quite a number of them). Furthermore, it means that people can reuse bits and pieces of Sun's codebase under the terms of the GPL-with-linking-exception. And it removes the issue of what would happen to Java if Sun really hit hard times.
In the short term, this means much better availability and integration of Sun's Java implementation into Linux and other systems.
In the long term, it means that Sun's mediocre garbage collector, JIT, and toolkit bindings can be overhauled by combining Sun's Java library code (which has always been the biggest obstacle to compatibility) with systems like IKVM, Jikes, and gcj.
It won't solve any of the numerous technical problems Java has accumulated (at least not in the short term), but it puts Java back in the running.
It appears to be the GPL with a linking exception, which is probably a better choice than the LGPL.
The standard C library on Linux systems also uses GPL with a linking exception, so we know it works for these purposes, both legally and technically.
I don't see why people get so upset about this. The agreement is pretty meaningless as far as open source is concerned. Microsoft probably made it in order (1) to spread FUD, (2) maybe actually get involved a little with Linux, and (3) to get cross licenses for Novell's patents. It's not like it's a huge amount of money for them, but it does help Novell, and Novell has actually contributed positively for the time being.
Leaving open access points for anything other than actually expressly providing open access should be a crime. In fact, there's a lot of nefarious activity that someone like that could be up to, and at the very least, it can cause problems for nearby users who may be connecting to the wrong access point.
My point was that Microsoft has likely hired all the developers it can get and/or manage efficiently, cutting "cosmetic" staff won't do anything to improve software quality.
I disagree. First, cosmetics papers over a lot of bad UI design, so by focusing on music and graphics, Microsoft can get away with stuff they couldn't get away with if their product had to succeed on its functionality alone. Second, these kinds of efforts send a clear signal to all employees what the company actually values. Third, these people need to be managed and their efforts need to get coordinated with software development, and that takes resources and creates risks, too.
Cutting staff that's not essential to software quality often does seem to improve software quality because the remaining people can better focus on making quality software.