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by James Robertson.
Original Post: This is a business?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
"For Sun to have such a hold on Java seems a little silly to me," said Peter Underwood, vice president of software development at Wall Street Access, a N.Y.-based brokerage firm. "It's time to release the programming language to the open-source community", he said
"Sun makes phenomenal hardware. It has a great operating system. And it helped create a fabulous programming language," said Crowhurst, who runs a mixed Java and Microsoft shop. "But why they need to control Java, I don't understand."
Still, Java's future is assured, regardless of which way Sun heads. 1CWhatever happens, the Java standard will stay alive, 1D said Sharabu.
These people are deeply confused. Sun, like any other company, is a business. They aren't a charity - Java's goal was to drive more business to Sun (in the form of hardware sales). The end of the dot-com era, combined with an improved Windows (server) and the rise of Linux (on commodity hardware) has dealt a pretty serious blow to that strategy, and it's clear that Sun is still trying to deal with those facts. Still, why would they open source Java? Their hardware is getting less valuable every day - as time goes by, Java is becoming the most valuable asset that Sun owns. If they made it open, they would be doing a disservice to their shareholders - and ultimately, that's who Sun has to answer to - not developers. It's clear why IBM, BEA (et. al.) would like to see an open source Java. It's less clear why developers don't grasp the position Sun is in. Eventually, they are going to have to attempt to monetize their massive investment in Java. I fully expects cries of shock when that happens.
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