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.""
Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:2, Insightful)
I respect Gosling as a very intelligent programmer and language designer, but his willingness to engage in personal attacks against others in the Software Community makes me question his personal judgement.
Java does not need to be Free to be useful, but such can be said without resorting to deriding the entire Software Freedom movement, IMO.
let's see what happens (Score:5, Insightful)
Even starting to sound like microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike GPLd software, the Java sources don't come with a viral infection clause that requires you to apply the GPL to your own code
Didn't sell your soul, huh?
1st law of thermodynamics (Score:5, Insightful)
Art doesn't obey the first law of thermodynamics either. Some people put their whole life, unrecognized, into creating art, and when they are long gone, their work is still with us. COMPENSATION and BUSINESS obey the 1st law of thermodynamics, but that is by no means the only driving force behind people.
Re:mmhmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see. My first exposure to RMS was being told as an undergrad that if I wanted to, I could go log into his accounts at MIT because he didn't bother to keep a password. He has proceeded to rant and rave and rail against anything that is not his pure community of software technicians giving their every line for the greater good.
RMS is essentially a kook.
I couldn't have said it better myself. He has certainly done many great things with his efforts, but in the general scheme of things, he's a kook. If you weren't so hung up on taking the observation personally and finding people to label "Anti Free" perhaps you'd be better able to accept this.
Finally, and to the point, Gosling doesn't call him a kook; he comments that RMS has a peculiar (as in unique) definition of "Free". Some of his comments about GPL are less charitable, but they don't involve whether RMS is a kook or not.
Did you even read the article? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you just not notice this? Or did you not read the article? I'm leaning toward the second, since first off it references nothing in this article whatsoever, and second that's an awful long and carefully-formed post to have gotten FP on. Either you read and type reeeal fast, or you wrote this beforehand and waited for another Sun story so you could grab an early post number and get up to Score:5.
So, at any rate, let's give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you read the article. So is what you are implying by your post that you believe Mr. Gosling to be lying when he explicitly brings up the things you allege and says they are entirely untrue and without basis? Why?
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where is IBM in the settlement? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Where is IBM in the settlement? (Score:1, Insightful)
Sun is weak right now, and they really don't have a good strategy to counter the full attack of IBM support and services, combined with Linux on their pSeries, xSeries, and mainframe platforms.
Ultimately, Sun will try to adopt the Opteron platform, but that's going to go over with Sun fans just about as well as SGI's foray into Intel workstations and Windows went over with SGI's fans.
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:3, Insightful)
While that bit was very confusing, what I believe Gosling was trying to do with his "viral license" paragraph was that he was simply trying to set up a comparison between the license on the Java materials and the GPL. I think he wasn't so much trying to say "the GPL is viral, and it's bad", as he was trying to say "the GPL has restrictions to reflect the agenda it's trying to push; the Java licenses have restrictions to reflect the agenda it's trying to push, and these restrictions aren't any more limiting from the developer perspective than what the GPL requires", as part of his defense of those restrictions.
This was of course just my interpretation and I could be wrong.
Hillarious! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where is IBM in the settlement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, I thought that was the whole point of the GPL, it is so free, you can make money off of it.
But I think it will be a while yet until we see Linux take over AIX. But it would be nice to have smit on linux.
This reminds me of a quote in someone's
Primarily what I want is software that doesn't suck.
If it is GPLed too all the better.
If IBM makes a profit from it good for them.
If I can make a profit from it then I'm really happy
I don't have faith in companies. (Score:4, Insightful)
But Java's still dependent on the interests of Sun (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure James Gosling only wants Java to flourish. But the big catch about the JDK's licence (SCSL) is that it gives Sun a Nuclear Button. Sun has the power to force the Java platform's development to go only in directions they approve. And however pure their intentions are, as a public company they have a legal duty to use that power in a way that makes the most money for their shareholders. If it is ever more profitable to kill Java, for Microsoft cash, say, then Sun will be legally obliged to do it.
Compare this to Perl or Python, where there is no Nuclear Button. No-one has the power to prohibit derivatives. And so Perl and Python developers have a much more concrete guarantee that those languages will still be living languages in 20 years' time. Meanwhile there's no sign of the "fragmentation problem" which James Gosling argues they ought to suffer from being truly Open-Source.
Re:Change in Rhetoric (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems to me making the payments as part of a settlement agreement and simply disengaging might have been the more sensible option from a pragmatic point of view.
That said, I don't actually know.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:1st law of thermodynamics (Score:2, Insightful)
Or sometimes it is purely personal, and they only do it to please themselves. So it isn't a one way thing where they put in all this energy to create and get nothing in return.
I really do believe that there is a return of some sort on every action that is taken by any one person, and most of the time it isn't cash that is the return.
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Even starting to sound like microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Even starting to sound like microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
It isn't the black/white world you make it out to be.
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Even starting to sound like microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
A developer with no obligations to others can impose any condition he wishes on a user who desires to use his creation. If you wrote it all yourself and didn't put that tiniest bit of GPLed code in then by all means exercise that freedom.
A user with no obligations to developers can claim any benefit of the code for himself, up and to and including claims of authorship and invention. A user in that position can profit from that code in any way he wishes and return nothing to the developer....not acknowledgement, not improvements, absolutely nothing he doesn't feel like doing.
In the real world, there isn't a way for both users and developers to have no responsibilities whatsoever regarding software. There are a lot of ways to balance the situation so that both sides can retain significant freedoms hence the spectrum of FOSS licenses. Most of these compromises between original developers and downstream recipients can reasonably be called free. ALL of them have restrictions or obligations for at least the recipient of a software package. Even the "truly free" BSD licenses absolutely require that the copyright notice be preserved. It also implictly requires acknowlegement that author had the right to license his work that a way and indeed still owns the original work. It is a dangerous subtlety for the likes of SCO to miss if they try to do to the BSD community what they are doing to the Linux community.
The GPL preserves certain liberties (the so-called "four freedoms") as long as certain responsibilities are accepted. You seem to want those liberties without the responsibility, that "tiniest bit of GPLed code". If you don't use that code then there isn't much argument is there?
I suppose that leaves room for the ongoing semantic debate over what freedom actually is. But there is no reasonable definition of freedom that doesn't include responsibility.
umm, I hate to say it but he's somewhat correct (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember Java is a library. They'd have to go with the LGPL.
Personally, I am a big fun of java and have been for years. I am a big fan of Open source, and have been for even longer. But I can not understand why people see the need for merging the two.
I have serious doubts that Java would continue at its current development schedule if open sourced. Nothing is stopping open source groups from working on a free Java right now. In fact GCJ and Kaffe people have been working on it for years.
Are they anyway close??
How can we tell Sun what to do with their developer time? Why not go donate some time/money/resources to an effort like kaffe.org instead?
Re:let's see what happens (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you trust your ecommerce site to Linux?
Let's face it, certification gives a certain amount of trust, but familiarity gives the rest.
Re:Sun's Generous Patent Grant (Score:3, Insightful)
Notably the fact that the patent grant only applies for implementations that:
- include a complete implementation of the current version of this specification without subsetting or supersetting;
- implement all the interfaces and functionality of the required packages of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, as defined by SUN, without subsetting or supersetting;
- pass all test suites relating to the most recent published version of the specification of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, that are available from SUN six (6) months prior to any beta release of the clean room implementation or upgrade thereto;
seem (at least on the face of it) problematical [ometer.com] for Open Source development. Those are fairly rigid requirements and if you are only 99% of the way there then you simply don't have a patent grant....Re:let's see what happens (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends. Linux and *BSD power a majority of the really impressive sites on the network so I'd certainly be in good company. Solaris is just too expensive for something so clusterable like web services.
Might use a big Solaris box to host the DB on the backend if the site was really major. Postgresql has made a lot of progress and I'll probably revise this remark in another year or so, but Oracle/DB2/Sybase is still what I'd want running the backend if a lot of money was riding on it just because it they have been doing replication and other such enterprise level things long enough to be trustworthy. Of course Oracle and IBM both support Linux as a tier 1 platform these days so running Linux all the way to the backend is certainly possible for all but the largest users who need the 128way Sun boxes.
And I think it goes without saying that Windows has no place in the enterprise except as legacy desktops. Period, end of story. Anyone suggesting otherwise has instantly proven themself to be incompetent and not to be trusted for advice on IT matters.
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it did contain stunningly misleading comparisons between the GPL and Java's licensing. He hides it all in a clever ruse- he accuses Stallman of redefining freedom to suit Stallman's agenda, then redefines freedom himself to suit Gosling's agenda. I'll leave as an exercise to the reader which license gives you more freedoms. Hint: it's the GPL.
Re:let's see what happens (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll have to agree with that sentiment.
Java is not like a web browser where the users would be ignorant, and just use Microsoft's because that's what they are given. Java developers _know_ who is the authentic source for Java technology. So it's not like Java developers in their masses are going to adopt whatever idiosyncrasies Microsoft implements next.
I think that Sun should be able to keep ahead of Microsoft on the curve of giving developers what they want (history shows that when somebody implements a good idea, Microsoft copies).
I don't think McNealy would let Microsoft steer the ship. I think this is a chess match. The current move may perplex you, as it should, but the reasons why the move was made will be clear soon.
Sun is a fierce in nature when it comes to Microsoft. Don't let yourself think that they gave in so easily. How many Microsoft competitors do you know of that were able to grep a $2 billon settlement out of them?
Re:the JAVA licence (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why a patch set for Java's sources was in the FreeBSD ports forever, yet everyone says 'freebsd didn't have Java.' There was no binary distribution of that possible because it hadn't passed through Sun yet.
The Java specs are available for the most part. The only problem is no one knows what the tests for Java compliance are, but anyone with the cash can send software to take them and be able to be called 'Java.' Other then that, everything you asked for in your post is already true.
Re:Change in Rhetoric (Score:5, Insightful)
I dissagree.
Has it not dawned on anyone else that Microsoft current averarching agenda is the Trusted Computing rollout? The information on the Microsoft/Sun deal is very light on details, but it sure looked to me like it included all the licencing and protocals Sun would need to produce Trusted Computing servers to operate with Microsoft Trusted desktops. It specifically mentioned "identity management" interoperability.
With Sun on board Microsoft gets to avoid charges that it's "Palladium" system is a monopoly. Suddenly it is a multi platform multivendor standard. $2 billion to sweepaway past anti-trust charges, to ensure
And mere days later Microsoft hands over nearly another half-billion to InterTrust to scoop up all of the DRM patents rights for Trusted Computing.
Microsoft is spreading the money around to pave the way for Trusted Computing. And for Microsoft it's pocket change.
What really catched my attention though is the timing on the two deals. Suns deal with Microsoft clears up past infringents by both parties, it grants Sun future rights to the required patentas Microsoft held. BUT! Microsoft did not yet hold InterTrust's DRM patents. Did Microsoft just pull a fast one on SUN? Possibly leaving Sun totally screwed because the deal did NOT include the InterTrust patents that Sun would actually end up needing?
That would be EXACTLY the sort of "sharp" business tactics Microsoft is notorious for. They dazzle their business "partners" with huge dollar signs to sign a deal, all the while holding a plan to yank the rug out from under them.
I think Sun better examine the InterTrust deal under a microscope then review their own contracts.
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Re:Even starting to sound like microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
I have one question for you:
What do you think would happen if you included a "little part" of Microsoft code?
*ALL* copyright is viral. If you use even a single line of Microsoft code you are infected by Microsoft's copyright.
If GPL is viral then Microsoft is ebola. GPL code may "infect" you if you choose to use it, but Microsoft code infects and instantly kill your entire project.
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Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:2, Insightful)
GPL to keep the source open. Java to make sure all implementations are compatible with the spec in order to keep the langage true write once run anywhere.
Debian are right not to include Sun's Java implementaion in the distro. It is not free as in freedom software. Sun are well within their rights not to let you use thier trademark or dilute their brand by calling an incomplete implementation of the spec Java or extending the spec and calling that Java.
Re:Gosling's RMS comments show him to be anti-Free (Score:4, Insightful)
It is no surprise to see Gosling attack the GPL. He is personally responsible for it's creation, and I don't mean that as a compliment. If it wasn't for him, RMS would have continued releasing his work into the public domain, at least until the next Gosling came along and demonstrated that freedom needs to be protected.
Re:Even starting to sound like microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's not "free!" Don't you get it? Your response is analogous to someone saying, "Music CDs are not 'free', because I'm not allowed to rip them to MP3 and give them to my friends," and you responding "You're perfectly free to not buy the CDs, and to make your own music."
Just because you happen to agree with the agenda in the GPL doesn't mean you can deny that the agenda exists.
The original poster is correct. If I am not free to use your software however I want, including closing up my derived source and selling the whole she-bang, then it is not truly "free."