Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz is not so sure about the idea of an open-source Java. Elsewhere, Sun seeks boost from stronger Java while in the meantime Sun slips and its CEO slams takeover talk: Sun’s shares dipped into negative territory Thursday after CEO Scott McNealy tried to shoot down rumors that the network-computer maker was a takeover target. Additionally, Web services must start delivering, says Sun, while they will also sell and support all x86 versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Q&A: Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz on Java’s future; More SUN News
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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SUN is a very innovative company its sad to say but SUN just needs a better way to market themself, the only way to surive is be cut troath this day an age, look at the Larry and Poeplesoft fiasco you dont win over customers being timid and passive.
I think SUN just needs to be more aggressive in their software arena.
Web services seems like a sale in and of itself. Vendors were supposed to make money by selling the tools. If the vendor couldn’t do that than he must now write more and more services, in other words, do all the work.
There is a lack of quality software out there. I mean, look at it this way. If I want to write a game, how am I supposed to accomplish this? I would need about a million dollars, and fifteen or twenty skilled workers. We don’t have enough quality software that helps us to produce services because too much research is locked behind closed doors. As I said before, if there were game frameworks available to people who can use them to create games. Quality software that is generic, that can be reused by many individuals. That might allow me to produce a game at a quarter of the cost, and about five or six developers. Service should be based on talent and individual expression not just on the people with lot’s of money, because if those people don’t find the market to be rich enough to profit the project is dead.
It would help to have generic tools, shared tools, that allow more people to enter the market. The most successful sales will occur if the people can find individual expression and the ability to create something original. We just need quality software to help people to be able to traverse often huge expanses from point A to point B in software. Where is the software to do that, to allow people to work with your middleware to accomplish awesome results.
So who would incur all the cost of developing such framework? Who would reap all the benefits?
The thing is that the research is already there and some of it is being sold or shared between game development firms. What I am suggesting though is that research be done one time, and placed in a generic framework so that it can be reused. That is what I associate with quality software. I can’t think of anyone who would not be a benefactor.
If you liked say the water in the game MorrowWind, and you developed a character or ship that you wanted to fly, or if you wanted to build a castle with rooms, than a game framework would be able to provide you a foundation for all of these features, yet allow you enough room to add new elements such as your own characters, your own themes, your own storylines, and also ofcourse your own specialized graphics. The technology wouldn’t just be limited to games, but it would allow you to use animated characters and high quality graphics in normal GUI applications. The main issue that generic designs brings to the table is that it helps to bridge the massive gap between point A and point B in software development. There are about a million ways to make money from giving users more power to be creative.
Would you ever use JSP as the hosting language for a website that gets in the order of 50,000 unique web visitors a day in traffic?
If not, what language would you use if the content delivered was truly dynamic? (please include OS too)
Frameworks have been developed to certain extent, many games have used the Quake3 engine or the Unreal engine. The problem is that the state of the graphics changes rather quickly so each engine is rewritten every couple of years. If you are interested there is a nice open source engine called Crytal Space.
Also the axiom that it easier to write code then to read it makes it so every developer wants to write everything from scratch.
There are more generic game tools available than for just about any other industry.
All you need to do is grab something like Crystal Space or the Quake1/2 engine sourcecode, and you are good to go.
Yes, you probably do need a million dollars and a team of fifteen or twenty people to make a decent 3D game. It won’t get any easier than this, because you need a million dollars and a team of fifteen or twenty people to accomplish any task on par with the production of a decent 3D game.
You can have all the generic tools in the world, but any good game includes a rather large amount of original material – thats what makes a good game. It takes fifteen or twenty people and a million dollars to produce this original material.
What gives you the impression that you can’t use free and/or off-the-shelf generic tools to put together your storylines, artwork etc., and embed those tools into apps etc?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/31325.html
They also have new Workstations coming out next week. Probably to steal Apples thunder at WWDC
“What will cause open-source products to win is if they are better, and it has nothing to do with source code.”
Duh.
RE: Anonymous (IP: —.dsl.wacotx.swbell.net)
Well you could use JSP or ASP via Chill!soft ASP server which is now owned by SUN Microsystems. Take you pick.
RE: phusnikn (IP: —.nyc.rr.com)
Obviously you must have living under a rock for the last 5 years because I have been following SUN and their SEC filings and if you take out the one offs, there software and services side is increase in profits whilst the revenue on hardware decreases as they cut costs and reduce prices to compete against IBM.
Well, it is not a revelation, however, I am sure there will be the OSS zealots making conspiracy theories about SUN, Microsoft and the boogie man.
btw the post By Anonymous (IP: —.a.001.cba.iprimus.net.au) was me. I’ve move browsers from Netscape to Mozilla 1.3.1 on Solaris x86.
GPL software is software for the group. There might be some examples out there of these generic frameworks, great, and they would be even better once quality software matters. Software that bridges the gaps.
LGPL software is your individual specialization, you don’t have to give that code up, and you can be as creative as you want, even more so when you leverage GPL libraries.
Johnathan Swartz has a screw loose. Java has neither. It is controlled by Sun and partially by IBM and for some reason neither company wants to let go and submit the language to a real standards body where it can be taken seriously.
And I love Java and so many of the ideas in Java. I have met a lot of the engineers and the ones I have spoken to agree with me.
Are you some sort of idiot? SUN has ONE vote on the JCP which decides what is added to the Java specification. How about YOU get your fact correct before making such stupid unsubstantiated claims.
Sun *owns* Java and can do what they want. However! all Java related development goes through the JSR (Java Specification Request), where Sun has equal power with the rest of the participating companies.
For the record, 4(!) of Suns JSR’s have just been dismissed by other members:
http://www.sdtimes.com/news/080/emb2.htm
This goes to show that Sun is NOT controlling Java per se.
does Schwartz sound awfully bitter.
Looks like Sun and Microsoft still are planning to take over the whole world and keep all of the control to themselves. Yet what exactly are they offering? I mean, books are not even electronic yet, about the only thing they are offering is email. I think that businesses might be better off to go back to pencil and recycled paper and save a hell of a lot of money.
Open source innovation is about having a large public knowledge base and than choices regarding services. The GPL projects should focus on generic infrastructure and packaging based on open standards and quality software, that are designed to bridge the gap to large scale projects.
The open source libraries are co-operative rather than competitive. Developers compete through services and specialization.
Another thing is that if Java was GPLed than if Microsoft tried to use it in .Net, than .Net would have to become open source.
Right on. I’m actually moving my own stuff back to paper. The computer has proven to be far more work and upkeep than it is worth. Fuck it. What a lie.
The lack of quality software and quality hardware is making the whole value proposition of computers a sham, at least in the “IT” space. Just about every computer mag and journal has an expose these days on what crap enterprise software is and how the real cost of enterprise hardware is exceedingly high vs. the benefits.
For all the time computers have been around, not much software works together. Even in monocultures such as .NET and Java, software still is mostly silo-ware. And data is even less portable than code! Every damn OS out there hides all sorts of little files in secret cubbies so backups and restores and moves to new computers are extremely painful. The whole thing needs to be redone.
Open source is the only good idea in software that’s happened in the past 5 years or so. And that’s largely a response to the chill that’s long been on the market due to the presence of the Microsoft monopolies on operating systems and office suites.
I think that corporations, after a few years, will repackage their rearch and development and resell it in a new format. Unfortunately this means that the developers using the old libraries are disenfranchised because the vendor controls the libraries and the rights. If those libraries were open source, than disenfranchisement would be impossible unless everyone agreed. The people reserve the right to continue to use and to further develop those libraries. A case can be make to transfer to a new format, but it is not a forced migration. A vendor has as many methods as he has reasons to upset the boat because their bottom line is to make money.
Closed source development has it’s place, and that is in the hands of individuals and small groups, not controlling monopolies.
I know of a corporation which is profiting while using very old computer technology from the early 1980’s. Why should they upgrade? It would only make sense if they could upgrade without high cost associated with the move. Yet this is definately not the Microsoft/Sun/Oracle route. They are actually using old IBM software and terminals. :+)
A home user can get value out of the current Microsoft platforms, however most of their software is pirated software downloaded from Kazaa. As soon as they are not allowed to have pirated software, I wonder why they will want a computer. Personally I stay with older and cheaper hardware which runs perfectly fine and I use a GPL platform (RH Linux) which I downloaded and evaluated before subscribing for $60.00, and I am learning how to develop with LGPL libraries Gtk+ and Gtkmm.
Life is actually great but these corporations always try to upset the boat. I wonder if they are doing anything that is good, anything at all. It would be great if they all dissapeared.
Right on. I’m actually moving my own stuff back to paper. The computer has proven to be far more work and upkeep than it is worth. Fuck it. What a lie.
Been saying that for years. It’s good for some things. It’s not good for everything. The cost savings for the average office have been way overhyped as various account and auditing bodies around the world have been discovering over the past few years. There’s also been a human cost as jobs have been transfered, deskilled, and wealth has transferred to the pockets of a few. I hate the bastard things and I’m a programmer…
It appears that the user must be responsible and ensure that the technology is serving their needs and not the other way around. It might even be worth forming a group for evaluating these things.
If Microsoft and the SCO or whoever, that seeks to get their grubby hands on total control in the industry, is only going to drown everything that is good once they start to sink, than it might be better to just put your money in the bank while you can. Really question your investment. I think that the open source route is much less damaging and a better long term investment, but even that might get pulled under by these struggling monopolies who are destined to fail yet currently have way too much power and influence.
Guess I trust real standards bodies rather than one put together by Sun – who, at the end of the day, still have total control over the language.
I applaud the JCP as a better solution than not having a solution, but Java will remain Sun’s proprietary language for the time being.
I don’t care what “standard” body controls the language. I only care about results. Which is why I do most of my work in Perl. But Java is nice, too.
I think of java as a more experimental language, for me. I grew up with structured programming and I understand that methodology much better. But a combination of java and perl will help me learn object oriented programming better than learning Java alone. There are many new concepts to programming with Java that don’t come naturally to me. Perhaps that’s because they are complex or perhaps they just don’t make sense at all. I won’t know until I have experience with every concept, and that will take some time.
In the mean time I find the changes to Perl’s object oriented behavior to be rather interesting. I’d love to see how these languages develope in the future and if they could ever compete with C/C++/ocaml or assembly for efficiency. But I guess most of you have no problems doing your CGI in ASP and your text processing in Java. Its just me. I’m weird.