Tue, 04 May 2004
JavaLobby
I spent today reading a few threads on JavaLobby. What a sad waste of time that was! We've finally found a place where the typical comment level is even lower than on SlashDot.
As DV points out, it sucks that some folks don't get it. Even, it turns out, folks who are ostensibly in our own community.
One question that comes up from time to time is "what good is an open Java?". The answer to that is so obvious that we generally just skip over it, assuming everybody has been following along the last ten years. Apparently, they haven't.
So, the story is, any single entity that controls access to the source will be driven by the incentives that affect them. For instance in the software market you often see companies moving more toward enterprise customers, leaving the lower end to be filled by others. The general idea here, btw, is true regardless of whether we are talking about open or closed source -- for open source the incentives differ (and of course the consequences differ too, as we'll see).
What this implies is that, if you aren't along the "incentive path" of the gatekeeping organization, you are in trouble. This is one reason that open source is useful -- it is a way for users to reduce their risk when adopting technologies, since they have some ability to solve the problems they face in their "less interesting" environment.
Another way to be screwed by non-free software is to be working on an area that is "anti-strategic". In this scenario, the gatekeeper decides that supporting your situation is actively against their interests. Then you are just completely out of luck.
Now, for Java and Linux the way this plays out is that Linux's higher rate of change occasionally undermines JVMs. Linux vendors typically have a hard time shipping a solid JVM on all their supported platforms in a timely way, especially if there have been changes in the kernel or libc -- floating stacks, SELinux, NPTL, or even more mundane things.
Considerations like this are what drove us to actually implement gcj-eclipse (as opposed to just dreaming about it and hacking on it in my spare time). There simply wasn't a way to get a working JVM on all our target platforms on our schedule.
Contrast this with, say, any other piece of the entire operating system. With free software, you run your own life. If you want to build an operating system that works on S/390, or PPC64, or whatever, you can port anything you think is important to it. It might not be easy, etc, but at least you have the option. Case in point: for the JVM we had to punt, but for Eclipse we put in the work to make a 64-bit port. So, there's your value right there.
So far we haven't really run into the "anti-strategic" scenario in the Java-on-Linux thing, though I've seen various folks predict its arrival on the assumption that Sun will turn to the IP protection racket as their technology business slides. If that happens it will be a nice bit of punctuation to the whole free software saga -- sort of the moral at the end explaining why tying your fate to an organization whose needs, eventually, diverge from your own.
Dalibor has some nice things to say on the doomsday scenario of Sun moving into the protection racket, and some of the goofier aspects of the SCSL and TCK licenses.
Specific ResponseI read through Fleury's comments again. I've debunked most of this stuff already, I won't bother doing it again.
gcjxgcjx development has been going a bit slow lately. I'm working on fixing anonymous classes and the capture of final local variables, it is sort of slow going.
Eclipse 3I've been looking at Eclipse 3.0M8 lately. It seems pretty good -- faster, more eye candy (actually a minus for me, a plus for some I guess), some handy new compiler knobs. Also it has a built-in code formatting feature, which can mostly handle GNU Classpath's style. I'll probably check in the style file at some point, meanwhile email me if you want a copy.
posted at: 13:33 | path: /software | permanent link to this entry
