Thursday May 18, 2006 No Monopoly on Good
There I was thinking we'd done something useful and good, getting the DLJ written and decent packages produced for Java SE 5 on GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris, and not pretending it was open source Java yet. I understand there's a lot of history here, but for goodness sake give me a break and see it for what it is, a positive token of good-will and intent to deliver in a new context despite the prejudices of history and the tensions they've produced. If there are issues with DLJ I'll address them, but there's no monopoly on good.
Posted by webmink
( May 18 2006, 11:38:19 PM PDT )
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Posted by Bob Sutor's Open Blog on May 19, 2006 at 07:41 AM PDT #
Did all those people running WebSphere and BEA on Linux know they were violating some prime directive?
When Sun open-sources Java, I will be real interested in seeing how these ninnies hold IBM's and BEA's feet to the fire on open sourcing their JVMs. I would not hold my breath for either.
I for one am tired of one company constantly being held to a different standard than the rest of the industry.
Posted by Mark on May 19, 2006 at 08:23 PM PDT #
Now, keep in mind that a decade is between 10 and 20% of the entire history of computers in society. And, it's just slightly smaller than the entire public life of Java. In otherwords, a decade is forever.
Yes, the Open Source community should see what you've done as a token of good will. But there have been many other tokens of good will over time that haven't amounted to a hill of beans, and so my advice to you is to expect that each and every token of goodwill is going to be met with some amount of trepidation an skepticism and even a bit of "it doesn't matter".
The unfortunate truth is that your specific token of good will went out at the same time that the statement of "Not when, but how" for the general JDK was made. This is a statement that has been well known by all the people who have walked into the room where Open Source and Java have been discussed. It was the commonly accepted wisdom when I worked at Sun. You'll remember that I left 5 years ago. That's 5 years that the same basic message has been repeated. The only difference is the size of the audience it gets told to. So, you'll have to understand that your token got lost or confused in the general dispair that greeted the "Not when, but how." You see, people have heard that or something like it so many times that it causes an amount of frustration that buries out this other bit of niceness that you were able to accomplish.
It sucks. I had many of my efforts overshadowed by statements made by executives when I worked at Sun. At some point it becomes tiresome. There were many reasons I left Sun, but the intractability of this situtation is the primary one. In a perfect world, you would have been able to push what you were working on independently of any other messaging. Sure, you would have gotten some push back, but not the amount that you got when corssed with the other pronoucements made.
Anyway, I'm truly sorry that your token of good will came along at the same time as pronouncements about the entire Java-Open Source question and so therefore a lot more criticism came out which shat on your parade. It sucks. It's hard to put a lot of work into something and have it crapped on.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson on May 22, 2006 at 02:00 PM PDT #
A new iteration of Ubuntu is due out shortly. My end-to-end test is if we will find Sun Java included in that distribution without any unneeded trouble. I am hopeful. :)
As to the rest ... we will see.
Posted by Preston L. Bannister on May 22, 2006 at 05:04 PM PDT #
Posted by Simon Phipps on May 24, 2006 at 12:32 PM PDT #