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

[Marc Spitzer]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:29:45 -0800, pete wright <nomadlogic at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

That is a somewhat misleading number.  The reason I feel this way is
that, from my limited exp, once you say Java/servlets/EJB etc the
hosting providers say you have money to spend and package accordingly,
even for the low end.  You do not get the cheap mass market LAMP/BAMP
packages.  you get the "low end" dedicated server packages.  Or CoLo
packages.  After all if you are doing java you have a "budget" and we
want our chunk.

> 
> 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.

All it takes for sun to do that is money, for example IFF I could call
sun up and say I want native support for freebsd and will pay for the
people to do it, sign a contract and cut a check I do not see the
problem.  But I am not rich.

> 
> >
> > 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.

Both efforts are/were funded, to different degrees perhaps, and
because of that things got done.  And the freebsd port is having
problems because it is primarily a volunteer effort with a small team
and a large code base to port.

> 
> > >
> > > 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)

Sun trys to make everything depend on java, marketing demands it.

> 
> 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 ;)

I am greedy too, human nature after all.  But I an no big fan of java,
70s tech with a large marketing budget.

marc