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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.NET has gotten as far as it has in such a short period of time because it comes with a single marketing/business message. We know what Microsoft is about, we know their angle.
Sun on the other hand has stock which is in the doldrums, is looking to hang on to Java for revenue and woo the market/investors at the same time, and obviously the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. They also see how far Microsoft has come, and they look at others such as IBM pushing into the Linux front. There is no way that they can not be apprehensive about what IBM or others will do with Java if it is opensourced. Someone may become a bigger evangelist than they are - and in that space, he with the most money wins.
The contradicting statements tell me that either they don't have their act together (anywhere else these folks releasing statements that contradict each other would be fired just due to the damage this can do to reputation and investor interest), or they have not figured out a strategy of how to opensource Java and make money at the same time.
They are operating in amputated chicken head mode, and I've seen this a number of times. The only thing you can be sure of is that they will in the end more than likely make a stupid decision (although I'm sure Java supporters will spin it - much like the open letter calls Java the successor to C/C++ (pfft)) that will damage the community (if the wish is 100% opensourcing of Java, which it at present appears to be). We've already seen the contradicting press statements, this is only the beginning.