Star Open Letter to Sun: The Case for Open-Sourcing Java
Linked by Michael Klein on Sat 5th Jun 2004 06:48 UTC
Java 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.
E-mail Print r 0   · Read More · 62 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/5m2
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.

Hi Raptor,

yeah, even Sun has bugs, just like everyone else.

What I did find interesting in this case, was that sun apparently let a known, but hard to trigger compatibility test failure slip into their release. Which I regard as simply human, as everyone's ressources are limited. But it is a point in the compatibility debate, in my opinion, since it shows that ocassionally even Sun has trouble getting it right and has to make uneasy choices.

The purpose of that quote from Sun's documentation was to give the assertion of perfect compatibility a small reality check: Sun is not perfect at it, just like anyone else.

Thank you very much for the best wishes, and please do feel welcome to join in the effort, if you are not tainted [1]. You can find me, and other Classpath hackers on #kaffe and #classpath on irc.freenode.org if you need some hands on assistance to get started, or if you just plain want to chat. ;)

Kaffe in particular is in need of good, low-level C hackers, who know their Unix programming, just as it needs more Java hackers to improve the existing class libraries.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/docs/hacking.html#SEC2