Monday, March 07, 2005

LinuxWorld | Father of Java chides open source developer community

Yup this is what i was talking about.

2 comments:

Prasanna S said...

I have already expressed my opinions on the vision and future of open source. Now regarding this piece of news that claims that James Goseling chided the open source developer community.

Sun Micro -Systems is open sourcing Solaris 10 . This can run on x86, SPARC and Alpha machines!

The so called Linux community ( that mainly includes people from IBM , Novell, Redhat, and other companies and a few independent devs like Trovalds himself, ARE wary of that move, to say the least. Solaris is going to COMPETE mainly with Linux.

Whenever a new person enters a market, it is customory for the existing players to express FUDs over the new peson's ventures. (Microsoft has been doing this for half a decade now and still does it over Linux). The repeated comments from Trovalds and top personnel from IBM that SUN is going to find it difficult to build community around Solaris is rooted on similar sentiments.

linuxworld.au is a linux news site run by one of those linux enthusiasts that have similar sentiments too. My confident guess is that the site has done some very severe cherry picking on the news, and the fact it neither clearly gives the context of Goseling's speech nor does it provide a link to the full speech provides us with the necessary evidence!

I know Goseling would have chided Red hat and Novell, but never would we have chided open source as a whole,
I have good reasons to think so.
1. This comes at a juncture where SUN is having its eyes big at open source solaris.

2. He is the father of Java and NetBeans. While to me Java is as much open source as Linux is, but not to others. But on Net Beans every body agrees that it is fully open source tool. Infact it is the winner of the Open source tool of the Year award for 2004. http://netbeans.org and also read Goseling's happiness over it. ( His post on this years Valentine's day :-) )

3. After all, he is a part of that so called community.

I think SUN is one company that has a sensible and a more frank view on open source and its implications. Do take time to go through Greg Papadopolus Blog where he talks about the way in which the word "community" is misused or abused.
I have a big story why both SUN and IBM are fighting for the lead in open source market. Please do tell me if you are interested. I will be more than happy to narrate :-)

Also a good read : http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan ..... Esp the post titled " Looking Back on Commodities" .

P.S: I came here to SUN's defense purely on one ground : It was the party under attack!

Ananth said...

Ah please go ahead. I am dying to hear from you....