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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But the thing is, a freely modifiable and forkable version of Java will happen -- with or without Sun's blessing. There are already several open source JVMs and GNU Classpath is working on the class library. If Sun had opened Java, these projects could have started with Sun's code and put their efforts on enhancing Java, instead of spending all their time and effort on reimplementing what Sun already has done.
In fact, the risk for incompatibilites is much greater because of Sun's restrictive license. If Sun had opened Java there might have been incompatible forks; how is having a completely independent (and forkable) implementation any better?
Also, reimplementing everything from scratch instead of using Sun's code as a starting point increases the risk of subtle incompatibilities.