That's some good analysis and I think you hit the nail on that one. In some sense I think Sun went too far, by not thinking of a sustainable business model - people like Paul Graham pointed that out years ago. The benefits of Java has always been readable source, it is not clear to me exactly how much was gained by going open source with something as complex and essential. To me it almost looked like open source became a feature by itself, even though that has absolutely nothing to do with productivity and longevity.
Most other open source projects are funded through professional subscriptions and services and or products which lives on top of the open source project. JFreeChart's author makes a living by writing and selling documentation, while the framework itself is free. Novell pulls in money by i.e. selling a Mono iPhone development environment. Also keep in mind the damage inflicted on Sun's competitors, i.e. how Oracle had to stop charging for JDeveloper in order to compete with NetBeans. IntelliJ IDEA manages to make money by simply being the best, while having a fair price policy, but eventually NetBeans might take over here as well. Most developers are not religious FSF high priests, but realize that at the end of the day developers needs food on the table too. It is still not clear to me how Sun plans to make money on JavaFX, but the sheer amount of resources devoted to this suggests that they do (commercial RAD/WYSIWYG plugin for NetBeans?). It's a gamble I don't quite understand considering the narrow marked, the hefty competition, the new language and the late timing. /Casper On 24 Sep., 13:17, Robert Lally <rob.la...@gmail.com> wrote: > After all the discussions about Coin, Java 7, closures, participation, and > the JCP I'm left with the following understanding. > 1. There's no shortage of ideas. > 2. There is a shortage of analysis and implementations. > 3. There are no companies that have a vested interest, or a potential ROI, > in implementing the massive pile of ideas that already exist. Companies do > what they can, but resources everywhere are limited and it is irresponsible > to spend shareholder money on projects with no clear return. > 4. The open source ideal of a developer scratching his/her own itch doesn't > apply because "I think a closure here would save me four lines of code so > I'm going to spend 20 hours a week for the next four years making it happen" > doesn't make sense. If an individual did make this commitment it would be > out of altruism, not motivated self interest. > 5. There are few individual developers who have the time, motivation and > skills necessary to investigate, analyse and implement the massive pile of > ideas that already exist. The subset of them who also have nothing better to > do with their time is a vanishingly small number. > > So, no-one is to blame, no one has acted unreasonably or in bad faith or > with malice. The people with the money don't have the motivation, the people > with the skills have other responsibilities or are already doing as much as > they possibly can. > > As I compare the evolution of Java with the evolution of C#/.NET I'm left > with the feeling that the problem here is the open source/free nature of the > Java tools world. C# has changed and evolved, in recent years, faster than > Java. Microsoft has a vested interest in change and improvement - they sell > their tools, so they make money out of making and selling better tools. > Improvement/change leads to sales which finances farther development. This > virtuous cycle (if you deem it to be so) seems to be what we're missing. > > Have we, by reducing the cost of the tools we love, also reduced the value > to be gained by improving them to zero? I'm not really sure, but I think it > is possible. > > Rob Lally. > > -- > Blog :http://robertlally.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
