James Gosling On The Sun/Microsoft Settlement 361
greg_barton writes "James Gosling has responded to the two previous commentaries cited on Slashdot about the Java Dilemma. Some interesting excerpts: "In Rick Ross's 'Where Is Java In This Settlement?' he worries that Sun may have sold out the Java community. We didn't. We have not sold our soul to the Dark Side." and "There's a long thread of discussion on Slashdot 'Two Takes on the Java Dilemma' that is pretty entertaining, from a wow, what are they smoking! point of view. There are voices of reason, and conspiracy nuts.""
Re:Great! (Score:5, Informative)
There are Free open source implementations of Java already. Not quite up to the same level as the Sun's offerings yet, but it is difficult to hit a moving target...
Sun's Generous Patent Grant (Score:5, Informative)
So Java seems to be less encumbered than .Net at this point.
Re:How does Sun make money from Java? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Even starting to sound like microsoft (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Did you even read the article? (Score:3, Informative)
You just got people to mod him down and you just linked back to his current post.
I Feel kinda bad for the dude though, he made a debateably insightful post, and was able to do it as a first post because he's a subscriber.
Bravo on your troll though.
Re:let's see what happens (Score:5, Informative)
Sun's JVM is a free download.
That might be true for Sun's JVM.
You're simply wrong.
There are several free JVMs on Linux and they are trivial to install (apt-get install).
Re:mmhmm (Score:3, Informative)
Gosling's beef with RMS: Full Disclosure (Score:5, Informative)
Some of you may know this already, but for those who don't, RMS and James Gosling had a feud in the 80s over Gosling's Emacs (which was a TECO Emacs workalike). Apparently, there were agreements between Gosling and several other developers to the effect that they could modify and redistribute the source to Gosling's Emacs. RMS decided to base the original GNU Emacs on Gosling's code. Apparently, this happened after Gosling decided to sell the rights to his Emacs clone to Unipress, and bitter legal threats ensued. This seems to have been one of the primary motivations for the GPL. I've never seen Gosling speak or write about the incident since. RMS gave a speech [gnu.org] in 1986 where he recounted the incident, and he didn't have a lot of good things to say about Gosling:
That speech also has a few memorable quotes, and I highly recommend you read it. I haven't heard or read RMS referring to Gosling personally since, but I believe that the incident itself has been recalled by him a few times since.
Now for my part of the disclosure: I currently attend the University of Calgary, where James Gosling is the only persona anywhere near to fame that the Computer Science department has ever produced (Theo de Raadt doesn't count, unless your definition of "produce" involves scandal and legal threats).
The above is mostly just hearsay and speculation, and should not be taken as authoritative, except the excerpt from RMS's speech.
back to what is independent... (Score:3, Informative)
As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library. If you modify this library, you may extend this exception to your version of the library, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
As such, it can be used to run, create and distribute a large class of applications and applets. When GNU Classpath is used unmodified as the core class library for a virtual machine, compiler for the java languge, or for a program written in the java programming language it does not affect the licensing for distributing those programs directly."
OK (Score:3, Informative)
From the April 2, 2004 Sun Press Releases [sun.com]
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:3, Informative)
Which is why the option of LGPL exists.. or GPL plus some extra exemptions.. or other similar licenses that force freedom of the libraries but allow linking by that which is non-free.
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, it always seemed to me that it's close to impossible finding a middle ground if you want to argue with RMS, and people just don't try it anymore.