On 11/7/06, Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I doubt it's something earth shattering. But it is an insurance policy for Sun. In order to compete with the Microsoft/Novell conspiracy (umm did I say that?), by GPLing Java, Sun can bring IBM and other community- based resources, such as GNU gcj and classpath, to bear on making Java better and more competitive with .NET. At the same time they don't have
I'd say it's the other way around. .NET is trying to compete in a Java dominated market. They are doing very well, but they are still the underdog. Nothing against .NET, I'm just clarifying that Sun didn't do this out of desperation to compete with MS+Novell and .NET. But I do think this will give Linux/Mono users one less reason to choose mono over java.
to crawl into bed with IBM (and get squished) because the GPL will make sure that IBM's benefits can come back and help Sun too. There is a
Yup.
reason why Linux began after BSD but has now exceeded BSD in many areas, especially corporate interest. That's the GPL. Now Sun can also wield
Well, the biggest reason is because UC Berkley was in a serious lawsuit with AT&T over the legality of distributing the BSD codebase. Companies didn't want to adopt or contribute to the BSD codebase because the plug could be pulled at any time and legal action could even be directed at them. AT&T lost in 1997 -- Linux had too much steam by then. What SCO (and we all know that MS was behind it) tried to do to Linux is what actually happened to BSD. The GPL doesn't hurt, but I wouldn't say it is the reason that Linux is more successful than BSD. Linux didn't have the scary legal baggage that BSD had and people wanted a free UNIX... Hey let's try this Linux thing over here instead!
this to its advantage. One can only hope that Sun's schizophrenia with regards to open source in general has now been cured, and that they can figure out just what kind of company they are. Solaris? Linux? AMD? Sparc? Are we even a hardware company at all? Why do we do software again? Are we competing with Apple?
I don't care if Sun figures it out or not. Once the code is GPL they can make a bazillion dollars or go out of business. It doesn't effect GPL java users. However, Sun isn't going anywere. Novell, HP, and others would go out of business before Sun. -Bryan /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
