On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 04:35:44PM -0500, Shawn Walker wrote: > We already exist entirely at the pleasure of Sun, in a sense; they pay > for everything!
No. The thing that we, as defined in our constitution and as defined by what actually matters, has very little cost and requires only infrastructure that could be obtained elsewhere at little or no cost to us. Sun pays for infrastructure, and pays some engineers in our community to work on things it believes serve its competitive interests. It does not allow us to exist as a community; we require no such permission. > If they decided to shut the domain off tomorrow and then enforce > strict trademark usage, all we would be left with would be the > codebase and a lot of disenchanted people. I think you're undervaluing the code base. In many ways I think a "doomsday" scenario like this would actually be the best thing that could possibly happen to us. The real loser from that action would be Sun. An interesting subplot would be whether Sun-employed engineers continue to contribute their work to The Newly Renamed Community or Sun forks from the last available bits and resumes closed-source development; that loss would be far more crippling than the loss of a web site we mostly hate anyway. But I don't think it's necessary to plan for this kind of outcome at this point. It presupposes that a sizable number of people will act irrationally for quite some time. I don't agree with Garrett's assessment, and think he has presented us with a false dilemma. In the long run he may prove correct, but I do not agree that an all-or-nothing result is required here. If, as he suggests, Sun (the owner of the trademark) and the people it employs to manage the use of that mark prove to be bad actors, then and only then should we decide whether this issue justifies playing the MAD card. As displeased with Sun's actions as I am now, and as difficult as it is to find the responsible individual(s), I'm not yet willing to believe that these things cannot be fixed or cannot improve in the future. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
