[nycbug-talk] Sun, Microsoft Red Hat and Open Source

[Marc Spitzer]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:23:32 -0800, pete wright <nomadlogic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 07:01:01 -0500, Matthew Terenzio <matt at jobsforge.com> wrote:
> >
> > It claims Solaris, Microsoft and Red hat to be the dominating Operating
> > Systems headed for an epic battle.
> >
> > http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?
> > articleID=159907676
> >
> 
> "Sun stakes out a role as being the only company "truly committed to
> open source as a means of driving innovation and adoption," according
> to president Schwartz."
> 
> and yet java is closed source (despite the repeated claims that they
> will...then won't...then will open up java), and they have given how
> much support to the BSD community?

What percentage of there target market is BSD( minux OSX)?  If the
numbers are not there then it is fair for them to decide there is no
bang for the engineering buck here and not spend the money.  And there
exists ports to freebsd at least and do not forget about linux
emulation mode.

Also there is nothing stopping the open source community from building
java from scratch, all of the important bits are published, jvm,
language and library specs for version X, so all that would be needed
is people who are willing to do the work.  The problem here is that it
is a *lot* of work for each version and the libs that make it useful. 
We are talking a significant number of man/years here, this translates
into millions of dollars of donated time/money to see it happens. 
Also how many opensource QA hackers are out there, production grade
means lots of QA.

> 
> I'm sorry, while I do respect the hardware and software engineers at
> Sun whenever I hear Jason Schwartz get quoted it just leaves a bad
> taste in my mouth.

he did open source Solaris and Staroffice/Openoffice is that not good
enough even if he never opensources java?  That is a lot of stuff and
I think that openoffice still has a bunch of  Sun engineers working on
the project as their day job.  I know that is the case for Solaris.

And Sun should only give their property away when they believe it is
in there best interests, otherwise management is not acting in the
investors best interests and that *is* there job.

marc