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

[pete wright]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 13:58:30 -0500, Marc Spitzer <mspitzer at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 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.

I'd check out netcraft and just to see how many websites run some
variant of BSD which from my recent experience seems like a key market
for Sun/Java.  At my current employer we use *a lot* of jsp's and
such, unfortunately for me using BSD in this situation would be a no
go from the start.

While the FreeBSD Foundation has been working on getting more robust
support for FreeBSD working it does not seem like it has been the
easiest thing out there.  While it's great that we are able to use
linux emulation as well (I mean options are a great thing) I still
think there are definite benefits of having the language supported
natively.

> 
> 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.
> 

The only project I've seen that is actually making any headway in
doing this is the Gnu Java Compiler...which is GNU for better or
worse.  I believe RedHat is one of the primary backers on this
project.  It looks very interesting.  And I guess we should also
remember IBM has their own version of Java out too, which if I
remember correctly ran quite a bit quicker than Sun's implementaion on
i386 gnu/linux...although that was several years ago.

> >
> > 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 they went ahead and made java pretty much an integral part OOo
with the 2.x brach, for better or worse.
(check out: http://tinyurl.com/5gv2y its a newsforge article)

And yea, your right about them having engineers working on this
project (I've met several personally I think most of them are based in
Europe, atleast they were a couple years ago).

> 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.
> 

Yea totally, no doubt.  I agree with you here.  Sure, they don't have
to open anything up.  Would I like to see Java opened up, yea it'd
help me out for sure.  So I guess I'm just being greedy ;)

-p

-- 
~~o0OO0o~~
Pete Wright
www.nycbug.org
NYC's *BSD User Group