The value of native java

[Rudolf Kastl]

2006/2/20, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>:
> Hi,
>
> I won't quote your post because I disagree with pretty much all of it, and
> I don't expect you to understand my answers. You display a deep and basic
> misunderstanding of what Free Software in general and Fedora in particular
> are. Here is some food for thoughts :
>
> 1. item one : trusting "moral compacts" (or not). The free software
> movement was launched by people who felt betrayed by proprietary software
> vendors, which switched rules without warning because it suited them.
> They've learnt the hard way "moral compacts" are worth nothing when not
> backed by legal documents, if Sun wants people to commit on its tech it
> needs to commit itself first.

Sun at this point is not open source unfriendly. One could even argue
that you can download the sun java source. Its still not includeable
in the fedora distro. and well.. if it cant go in... its not really
relevant to us real fedorians ;)

>
> 2. item 2 : as SCO née Caldera shows, using rationality to predict
> proprietary software companies policies is a deep mistake
>
> 3. item 3 : Sun in particular has an habit of performing 180° policy
> changes every few years (x86 Solaris anyone) you'd be mad to rely on them.
> Besides, Sun corporate culture is not Linux-friendly

Sun at the moment though is rather open source friendly.

>
> 4. item 4 : Free Software does not have a startup-like short-term horizon.
> GNU/Linux didn't get there in months, so what if some release sucks we'll
> get it right in the end.

agreed. who cares about another iteration. we get the better product
in the end ;)

>
> 5. item 5 : Red Hat Linux and later Fedora have always been more commited
> than most of the Linux market to Free Software. All people who (like you)
> thought it was a marketing mistake, and predicted <instert name of foolish
> distro which made compromises with closed vendors like Sun> Linux would
> bury Red Hat were proved wrong by the market. Go convince someone else,
> we'll bury them like the others.

Guess why i picked redhat in the past? As someone that required closed
source stuff when i started i sometimes felt like a "victim" of the
zealots. But with more understanding of what its all about i got it
finally and became a zealot myself. No one can ever really fix the
hacked windows winmodem driver i required back then e.g. .... if youd
hack around proprietary crap instead of creating real solutions you
will never come there... it would always stay some "hacky but working
solution to make whiners shut up". Workarounds usually just discourage
people from putting effort into real solutions unless the workarounds
are ugly enough perhaps.

>
> Eclipse already rules the Java IDE market (see Borland corporate plans)
> Proprietary J2EE vendors are feeling the heat of Tomcat, Geronimo and
> JBoss (see Oracle+JBoss, IBM+Gluecode, BEA moving up the foodchain with
> Aqualogic).
> The next step is the JVM and Fedora inclusion shows it won't be too long
> to come.
>
> At this point in time it would be madness for any closed software vendor
> to wed itself too tightly to Sun Java, let alone for a FOSS actor like
> Fedora. If you really think corporate might is sufficient to capture the
> IT market I invite you to reflect on Itanium fate.

>
> --
> Nicolas Mailhot
>
> --
> fedora-devel-list mailing list
> fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
>

another opinion,
Rudolf Kastl