Doing the right thing [LWN.net]

Doing the right thing

Posted Aug 17, 2006 23:31 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
Parent article: Coming soon: a free Java

Sun should do here the exact opposite to what they did with OpenSolaris, where they made sure OpenSolaris community never exchanges any code with the Linux community. Instead, their number one priority should be making sure that *all current* free Java communities are better integrated with each other and can benefit from Sun's code drop. Of course, licensing of this code is going to be *crucial* to achieve this.

With embarrasing bugs like this:

http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4802695

Sun really do need the community to help. At present, the community has outdone Sun with gcjwebplugin, which can at least run *some* applets on 64-bit Linux machines. I know, it's not complete and all, but at least it *does run* for a limited number of cases, unlike Sun's implementation that does not even ship that code, after being asked repeatedly for over 3 1/2 years. This is just an example, of course.

So, Sun folks reading LWN (and I've been told by other LWN readers previously that they are visiting here regularly), please ask your management to do the right thing. Make sure Java becomes as ubiquitous as Perl on all Linux/Unix machines, by letting code be interchanged freely between your implementation and the others. Then we're going to be getting somewhere.

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