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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Excellent, that is the spirit I expected from the Open Source community. I wish you all the best in making your project a good Open Source alternative to Sun's Java VM.
I mean it. I am tired of ESR and Stallman always wanting people to follow their ideology. I would like the OSS community to step up to the plate and put their money where thier mouth is so to speak. It is always the claim that open source versions will always be better than the colsed source ones of anything. Now is the time to prove that claim. The Java Specs are open and available. The opensource community should be able to crank out an excellent VM fully compatible with the specs in no time. Those are the virtues of OSS aren't they, better quality, performance and time to market compared to close source because of many eyes and many more resources. And most of all free from all shackles of licensing.
Consider this a call to the open source community, show me the code. Show me that the OSS methodology is better than closed source.
How long would it take for the OSS community to crank out a fully compatible JVM up to 1.4.2 of Sun's VM?
GNU classpath has been at it for 2+ years. Kaffe for more. How much longer?
If someone involved can give me an esstimate I will gladly await the arrival of the VM. Companies can gladly await the arrival of said OSS vm to deploy thier solutions on linux.
Can the OSS developers commit to a deadline for thier vastly superior VM?
If I was a corporation that wants to buy the OSS philosophy I would need to know these things. And the Open source nature of the project should automatically mean faster development, better quality and performance.
Read the release notes from Sun on binary compatibility: each release breaks it in one small way or another. If you are lucky, you can continue running your code, if you are not, you need to rewrite it.
I went through the Relase Notes. There is nothing mentioned about intentional breaking of binary compatibility that I could see.
Are your refering to bugs? Are you saying that your versions will always be bug free?
All the best in your efforts.