Well, as someone who participated far more actively than Jonathan in that action, let me assure you that his account was not a precise description of what happened. The terms of the settlement was, for the most part, that Sun would license the Kodak patents for a considerable sum. It didn't have any impact on the further development of RMI-- what did seem to limit that was the Java community process and the pressure to not put anything into RMI over JRMP (which I still think of as RMI) that couldn't be mirrored in RMI over IIOP.
SPI mechanisms have been talked about for some time. I've never been convinced that these add much, but if that is the way the community wants to go, there are certainly designs that have been proposed that could be used as a starting point. JERI actually allows a lot of plug-compatibility for new forms of implementation, but if that is not sufficient, other things could be discussed. Jim Waldo On Apr 16, 2010, at 8:37 PM, Peter Firmstone wrote: > I'm guessing from Jonathan's recent comments on his blog, about Kodak suing > successfully for damages over RMI, that this impacted RMI negatively, nothing > has been done with RMI for a long time, I wonder what the terms of the > settlement were? > > Cheers, > > Peter. > > Gregg Wonderly wrote: >> What I would like to see is a mechanism for completely extracting the use of >> the java.rmi package use into an SPI like mechanism. The ability to then >> plug in some other details or more limited environments like those would be >> possible. >> >> I don't know any details, but I suspect that some of the use of RMI stiff >> was left over from the JSRs and maybe some was there as preparation for >> another eventual JSR attempt. >> >> In the end, RMI ended up not getting as much support, from the top brass and >> in the Sun Developer Advisory Council meetings, I detected some personality >> conflicts that were probably also a factor. Jonathan eliminated some of >> those... >> >> Gregg Wonderly >> >> Sent from my iPad >> >> >> >
