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Force Java Open-Source On Sun? Not Fair... (Updated)
Author: HumanX | Thursday February 26, 2004
This story is about choice and the right for all people to choose. Sun has the right to choose closed source and the open-source community has the right to choose open-source. But slinging mud at companies who support open-source is surely not the way to grow a movement.
** Post Your Comments at the end of the article.
As you may or may not know I support both open-source and close-source initiatives. Each has its right, each has its place and both should be respected. Sun, I am sure has spent quite alot of money on Java and in my opinion should not be forced into open-source. For those of you who do not know, Eric Raymond made some controversial statements to Sun requesting the release of Java to open-source. By the way, Sun is the company that gave us Open Office, which I believe cost Sun 500 million dollars. Whatever Sun's motives, they still did it.
Currently, you have Sun who offers Java and who has supported the open source community. Sun I am sure has spent many millions if not billions of dollars in not only developing JAVA, but marketing it as well. Does the open-source community have the right to demand Sun to change its current strategies?
Unfortunately, in my opinion, Sun is being attacked for both being a company and supporting open-source. Has the open-source community become so arrogant as to tell people how to run their operations? If Sun caves in and releases Java, will the open-source community go after other companies to release their code under open-source or fear the wrath of the open-source community?
The open-source community in my opinion should not support this. The open-source community does not want companies being afraid of it. That would be the most tragic thing that could happen to open-source. I thought the spirit of open-source was the freedom to choose, the spirit of we can do it another way. I thought the idea of open-source was to say "I do not like it your way with closed source, I will build it my way and share with the world".
First Eric Raymond asks this of Sun and then IBM urges. What comes next? Really, where does IBM get off saying this? They have plenty of closed-source software. I am an IBM fan by the way. They have come along way.
In closing, my concern is that the open-source community could be seen as a threat by companies. Companies may fear the open-source community will attempt to force them to release their code; and if not they do not, then that company will be faced with public contempt. The spirit of open-source is choice, choice for you and choice for companies. If people continue down this path, the open-source community will only cause companies to withdraw from Linux / open-source. The open-source ideals have come along way and have made vast inroads, lets not spoil the fun now. It is one thing to ask a company to open-source, but it is another to publicly attack them for not.
** Eric Raymond has given far more then his share to the open-source and Linux community. Though I may not see eye to eye with him on this particular issue, he has my respect.
Story by HumanX
Contact Humanx
The open-source community has been hearing reports that you have recently said of Sun Microsystem's strategy "The open-source model is our friend". We're glad to hear that, and Sun's support of OpenOffice.org certainly puts some weight behind the claim. But that support is curiously inconsistent, spotty in ways which suggests that Sun is confused in the way it thinks about and executes its open-source strategy.
That confusion is evident in another of your quotes. Many of us think you are right on when you say that "Sun [...] is less threatened by a zero-revenue model for software than just about anybody out there." We agree that the potential for you in using open-source software as a value multiplier for Sun's hardware business is huge. This wouldn't even be a novel move for Sun; your release of the NFS standards in 1984 was possibly the single most successful market-shaping maneuver in your company's history, and we'd love to help you repeat it.
But the casual equation between "open source" and "zero revenue" suggests that on another level you don't really know what you're talking about. Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun's when I just checked. Or ask IBM, which is using Linux as a lever to build a huge systems-integration business in markets like financial services that Sun has historically owned.
It doesn't have to be this way. If Sun were prepared to go all the way with open source it could seize back its position of industry leadership. Sun is one of a small handful of companies that would both have the smarts and the street cred to do even better than IBM has from a full-fledged alliance with the open-source community. Indeed, on historical grounds you might do better; many of the senior people in the movement are old-time Unix hackers who remember that Sun was founded by geeks like us at a time when IBM was the Great Satan.
But Sun has done other things that make us wonder if the vision and courage to choose the open-source path are really there. The suspicion persists that OpenOffice.org is just an expedient way to poke Microsoft in the eye, not the cutting edge of a open-source-friendly strategy that will position Sun for the future. Matters aren't helped by the fact that Sun appears, with Microsoft, to be one of the two companies doing most to stuff SCO's war chest for its attack on Linux.
In 1987, three years after the success of NFS, Sun lost the war to define the standard graphics interface for the next generation. The winner, the X Window System, was technically inferior to Sun's NeWS offering. But X had one critical advantage; it was open source. Ten years later in 1997, when Bill Joy came to a Linux conference to push Jini as a universal network-service protocol, we in the open-source community told him straight up "You can have ubiquity or you can have control. Pick one." He picked control, and Jini failed in its promise. The contrast with NFS could hardly be more stark.
Today, the big issue is Java. Sun's insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged Sun's long-term interests by throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl. Once again the choice is between control and ubiquity, and despite your claim that "open source is our friend" Sun appears to be choosing control. Sun's terms are so restrictive that Linux distributions cannot even include Java binaries for use as a browser plugin, let alone as a standalone development tool.
Mr. CEO, tear down that wall. You have millions of potential allies out here in the open-source community who would love to become Java developers and users if it didn't mean ceding control of their future to Sun. If you're serious about being a friend of open source, if you're serious about preparing Sun for the future we can all see coming in which code secrecy and proprietary lock-in will no longer be viable strategies, prove it. Let Java go.
Eric S. Raymond
President, Open Source Initiative
12 Feb 2004
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