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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They are similar, but there are some pretty key differences between them. One is Sun's "do it our way, or don't do it at all" attitude. The Java language and Swing are two great examples of this. Only after some serious competition popped up has Sun started making the long-overdue language upgrades (foreach statement, generics, etc). Swing has seen virtually no enhancement since its introduction, and is still a pretty awful API to write code with (and that's not even mentioning its attrocious visuals on every single platform I've ever run it on - looking like other Java apps isn't good enough - your app has to look identical to a platform's standard applications to be good enough). There are plenty of other things which are better implemented in .NET than Java - .NET remoting for instance is far more flexible than RMI, and in a lot of ways easier to code for. And that's just the tip of the iceburg.
Sun follows the JCP just like everybody involved in the JCP does. IF features in Java are include the JCP makes decisions on what and when these go into Java. Swing was mainly driven by IBM, they wanted the cross-platform GUI toolkit over AWT. Now that Swing didn't trun out as they hoped they going back to the original AWT roots with SWT.
The whole Open Source Java movement was inistigated by IBM and the Open source comunity just ran with it. IBM, incase you haven't noticed has been obsessed with "eclipsing" Sun. Thier product directly related to Java is called Eclipse, thier Power 6 project is called eclipz. The underlying message is clear, IBM with it's sugar coated Open Letter is sending an implicit message that Sun's control of Java is preventing them from taking over.