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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People who need a managed environment but want nothing to do with microsoft will use java. What else should they use?
People (like me) who like .NET will use mono. I would not use java unless somebody paid me a lot of money for it. I already turned down a java-related job because I think the language just sucks for many problem domains.
I think that .NET has gained so much momentum that sooner or later linux developers will have to use it or become totally irrelevant. And no, I don't mean C# exclusively. But take a look at the very interesting new languages like nemerle.
That said, it would be in SUNs best interest to open source java. An incompatible fork will not happen because it would be useless for the huge amount of existing java code. How many different forks are there for python, perl, php? If the fork doomsayers were right, there would be hundreds of different incopatible forks of all these languages.
The real issue is that java is an asset that SUN does not want to lose control over, but having java in the control of a company that is probably going the way of SCO in a few years gives some people the creeps.