OSNews

"That's tinfoil nonsense. Point me at a single case where MS sued anyone over patent infringement."

No, it is not nonsense. Actually, it could be nonsense if MS and Suse didn't tried they very best to assure people that only and I (they for several times) repeat ONLY legal Mono implementation is this one on Suse. If I hadn't seen Ballmer saying that for several times, I would keep my tinfoil hat on. Btw, did you know that MS took IBM's top dog patent guy something like a year and a half ago, to make sense of their patent portfolio? As I've said several times, I was under impression that Mono is totally safe, we were even considering it for some projects here with out .Net branch. However, I'm for sure not going that way now, I really dislike being threatened. And especially if it is with no reason.

"You are aware that, in order to be valid, a contract must have an end-date, correct?"

Far from correct. Have you ever signed any contracts lately?

"Whether you want to admit this or not, eventually there will emerge a single corporate Linux distribution. It will either be SUSE or Red Hat. As for the little guys, who cares. They don't drive adoption, anyway."

I'm not really sure about that, and would advise you to not being so sure either. There's no way there will be "one to rule them all" in Linux world, especially not with countries like China, Brazil, India coming into the picture. Btw, Sun is pushing Ubuntu, Oracle is going their own way, so what in the world gave you impression that there will be just one? To much MS centric thinking. For example, that would imply that just one Java app server is dominant on the market now. However, there are several dozens, with 3-4 of them having same or similar footprint.


"You're dreaming if you think that Sun is going to relinquish all control over Java to the open source community. Sure, you may get the source code, but Sun has been remarkably cagey about which license it's going to release under (my assertion is that it won't be GPL'd). So, in the end, you're still under Sun's control. Some freedom."


No, I'm not dreaming. Actually, I CAN get the source of Java right now, and even build it with changes, and even use it inside my company. So, they did relinquish some control even right now. They probably won't opensource it under GPL, but I don't care much about GPL, and actually don't think that GPL would be practical for Java. They will for sure opensource it under OSI approved license (probably similar to Solaris). JCP will remain in control of goes into official Java (the trademark), but no one could stop you or me to

a) propose some changes and drive them into official release (I actually pushed hard for sharing VM, subpixell AA and automatic subpixell AA in KDE, an got all what I wanted )
b) fix bugs as much as we want
c) fork, but you just won't be able to call it Java. Just like Mono is not called .Net

Btw, ALL of Java is going opensource, micro edition, standard edition and enterprise edition.

And finally, I don't expect Sun to ever pull this kind of nonsense that MS and Novell did. Sun is mostly selling hardware and services, what use would they have of Java if they suddenly say: oh yes, it IS portable, but you can work with it only on Solaris (free) and Ubuntu (free).

Aside from that, classpath is progressing nicely (missing just a really good VM), Harmony is getting some donations, Motorola is opensourcing their complete JME3.0 stack, from what I can see, we will have several choices in Java area, with licenses ranging from GPL, over Apache to whatever Sun chooses, and a means to pressure Sun to behave nicely.