Linked by Michael Klein on Sat 5th Jun 2004 06:48 UTC
This was a letter I recently wrote to Sun's head of global communications, Russ Castronovo, after reading his interview with Chuck Talk on orangecrate.com, and then reading the ongoing pro-/anti-Mono arguments over at PlanetGnome. Now that Sun seems to be on the brink of making the decision to open-source Java (or not to), I thought it would be an appropriate time to take action.
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Sun doesn't want to make Java open source for fear of many different incompatible versions of java being released. Its write-once-etc claims will be useless. Sun wants to retain control to ensure that Java remains a unified "standard" in the sense that java programs can run on any platform that has a JVM available. The JVM specifications are available and anyone can write their own JVM if they choose (see Blackdown, etc). Remember when MS tried to release a modified version of Java for windows. As soon as Java is released under a GPL-like license, developers will decide to fork the language to add "features" that will make these different implementations incompatible.
The .NET mono situation is exactly what they want to avoid. Mono has two incompatible stacks available, a MS compliant and a linux only stack of APIS. Plus, there is the another .Net implementation supported by GNU I believe that is not compatiable with either of the Mono stacks. The standards for .NET do not include most of the MS .NET libraries, so those are not standardized in any sense, so now we have a growing divide between the different .NET implementations.