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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"In J2SE 1.4.2, there is a known JCK failure. When running with the -enablesystemassertions flag, in rare cases, converting a floating-point number to a string can throw an assertion error."
I am assuming that the "rare cases" here means the bug 4905011 is known and occurs rarely. Which I assume means that the jvm will pass the JCK sometimes and in certain circumstances might not.
I don't think you can hold Sun to a degree of perfection that is not expected from any other software vendors. Like you said bugs do exist and if they are important enough will get fixed and the rate at which they will get fixed depends on thier prority. This is true for all complex hardware and software processes that have limited resources. Even Open source projects have resource limitations.
If Sun deliberately made a very important compatibility feature incompatible with other implementations becuase it gace them an edge it would be wrong. But bugs that cause incompatiblities in rare circumstances can not be considered a deliberate attempt. I think Sun's main concern is deliberate attempts by projects to make Java incompatible, becuase some one decided to do so becuase of thier beliefs and convictions, not bugs.