particularly the idea of software not being under a certain license somehow being “tainted”, so the “right people” won’t get behind it. It’s like there’s a self-appointed elite out there that believes that the best software developers are OSI-compliant-license-only developers, and nothing remotely proprietary can be successful. I think it’s a self-aggrandizing myth. Most software, open source, or not, is absolute crap quality, unsupported, hard to use dreck. Quality software development is the exception, and I don’t think the open source approach has a demonstrated a clear superiority here, because the licensing model has no effect on the fundamental scarcity of talent out there.

Why should Sun even care about the rise of the LAMP stack? What benefit does it provide people? Is it generating revenue anywhere near as much as .NET applications or Java applications? (Not that Sun has had much success selling Java software, but certainly IBM and BEA have). LAMP is the Microsoft Access of the web. It just means that most developers can slap things together on a language that often leads to unmaintainable monstrosities (PHP), and have very simple requirements (and can consequentially run on a very simple database).

And Java’s write once, run anywhere, is not a lie, no matter how much people repeat this ciche. I see people developing Java systems on Windows and deploying on Linux, or HP-UX, or Solaris — with completely different architectures, and even different VM’s, without any problems. Yes, this is for server-side applications, and yes, that’s all that really matters to most people in Java-land. Yes, there sometimes are incompatibilities, and they can be worked around. But the point is that single-code-bases are somehow “superior” to a competitve marketplace of implementations is complete crap. It’s just a different model, with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Have there been opportunity costs with Java’s licensing model? Absolutely! But let’s understand the context and stop the self-congratulating banter about how much more successful open source things have been over Java. Oops, that’s because they haven’t. People love to point out Java’s failures because its successes were so unbelievably massive. It was the fastest growing language and programming platform in computing history, and likely will remain that way for decades, until the next “dot-com” sized wave comes along.

The .net argument:
.Net versus Java. Let us just get one thing clear, the debate of which is better .net or Java usually means C# versus Java at least when it comes to language arguments. C# is a java clone, but microsoft has weiged the design decisions a bit different like checked vs unchecked exceptions. Saying one is better than the other should certainly be considered an opinion not a fact.

Multiple VMs:
Sun has allways provided both a free reference implemenation and the specs for both the language and the class libraries. (F)OSS people has somhow allways claimed this is not good enough release the source for the RI…

The multitude of open source VMs and class libraries effort, is really no fault of Sun’s. If all these OS groups would just work together they could have has a single open source VM + class libraries years ago. But they didn’t and that is entirely their own fault

One of suns arguments has been (and believe still is) is that open sourceing the RI would create even more fragmentation. I tend to agree with them, If the entire OSS land cannot work together to produce a single VM, then I will be very woried when coorporate interest and wanna-be tweakers gets their hands on the reference implemenation

Eclipse:
Eclipse certainly isn’t held back by its dependency on JRE RI and its license. First of all, as others noted it runs very well with GCJ. The reason many people are backing off is because of SWT, which is very non-java-

Mozilla 1:
I don’t see why Mozilla can not make an design that allows the use of Java extensions… It is entirely up to mozilla people to write such integration. If they need technical changes from the JVM I am pretty sure sun wouldn’t mind a JSR for that…

There might be a bundlig issues with the licence, but perhaps you should talk to the openoffice people, they are using java.

Mozilla pluin prioson
Again this is browser design.It is a matter of designing a proper interface between the two layers. Do the ground work and open a JSR.

Scripting:
Java 6 (mustang) allready supports scripting.

OSS and java
Many of the newer techonologies (JSRs) are open source, including reference implementaions. That includes AFAIK Tomcat,Glassfish JSF etc.

David Wragg: That memo is about technical issues with the old JVMs and solaris. Nothing to do with license issues

There are scripting languages where you can throw something up in a text editor and then there is Java where you can only feel productive in Eclipse.

I suppose there have been coding styles developed which look leaner, but to me java currently means pages full of getters and setters, full of overly verbose documentation, and then the latest achievement, the ugly “for” iterator over Collections which has yet another syntax different from all other programming languages I know. The concept of .jsp as template engine was also badly executed, since often errors in the .jsp are not caught until in the java compilation step, and then you had top dig out the matching .java for the .jsp from the app server.

Of course LAMP is moving the other direction, closer to java, so I expect that eventually some new scripting language will pop up to make things appear easy again.

I have use LAMP for over about 8 years now, and I don’t think it is good now days. It was inovative in 1998 when there are no other HTML embeded scripting language out there.

Check out helma.org, server side javascript implemented in Java. It uses java as a virtual machine instead of a programming language. As a side effect, the application written on a window machine can be zipped and code to a linux machine, and to a freebsd box to a sun machine without any problem or any modification. The system calls are taken care by the VM. No compiling is need, no lib dependency to worry about. Since java is mature, installing java is usually very easy. This can make a lot system admin’s job a lot easier.

With all the bad mouthing about Java out there it is easy to get sucked into the trend. Just remember .NET are just reinventing the wheels.

My view is very similar to this article, “Badmouthing Java”

http://scratchdisk.com/Random+Notes/December+2005/Badmouthing+Java/

Lol, I was all ready to be impressed, then the program hanged when it asked me to specify a directory and I had to kill it.

You guys are light years behind… check out this link

http://www.jgoodies.com/download/jdiskreport/jdiskreport.jnlp

If Mono could be built, why couldn’t an open source Java be built? So Kaffe is an attempt; why will Mono be more successful than Kaffe?

Answer – it won’t.

Interesting article on the “opportunity costs” of Java not being open source: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/wp-trackback.php?p=190 It fits in with my interest in the economics of programming languages, and adds a new twist to the debate over how t…