Dalibor Topic wrote: >> 'Harmony - runs fewer apps than the leading brand' is hardly a >> compelling tag line. > > 'Harmony - runs 100% of apps Sun does (sure it's obviously a rubbish claim, > but you should trust us anyway on our other claims)' is not a very > compelling tag line either. > > The 100% like Sun tag line has shown time over time to be false for IBM's > VM for example, since IBM does not ship some of the classes Sun does, so > vm-specific code using them fails in funny ways on it. > > But that's how it is, 100% maching semantics is practially only possible by > using the exact same sources. And we're deliberately not doing that, and > making our own decisions on quirks of the spec. > > Harmony is *always* going to run fewer apps than the leading brand, > unless it uses the exact same set of sources, no matter what sort of > outlandish marketing claims we chose to use as tag lines.
Let me try to be creative for a second, marketing wise. If we enter a pissing contest with Sun over who runs more apps, we lose. This is not what it's all about. Look at HTTPD, they never had to claim that they were faster or more secure or more useful than other web servers, they "just" needed to do follow the protocols precisely and work under all circumstances and all kinds of attack and respond quickly to vulnerabilities and to feature requests. Just like HTTPD, we can't change the "protocol", but we can talk to those who do, channeling ours and our users' feedback. Just like HTTPD, we don't win if we are faster, or if we have better marketing brochures... we win if we can make our users happy. Harmony's first goal is to pass certification to be able to enter the ball park (being legally admitted to play, that is). But the real game is to run the apps that our users care for. What a slogan? Gump on Harmony runs *exactly* like Gump on Sun's JDK... and at comparable speeds. And guess what? it's open source: if you can make it even faster, hook it up to your favorite profiler/debugger, or whatever you feel you need to implement that won't ruin compatibility with the spec, we'll love to incorporate your patches. It might take a while before "user innovation" really starts to kick in, after that, but sure enough, we'll have our "tab browsing"-like or "apache module"-like user-suggested feature that Sun's VM won't have but will still allow us to pass certification. And *then* is when the real fun begins. -- Stefano. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Terms of use : http://incubator.apache.org/harmony/mailing.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
