Too late? I hope not. [LWN.net]

Too late? I hope not.

Posted Jan 23, 2007 18:42 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Too late? I hope not. by sbishop
Parent article: LCA: Updates on the X Window System

What's interesting is both are linked to increasing Linux market pressure. In both cases Linux users forced the change, whereas the old UNIX/BSD guard was fine with the status-quo

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Too late? I hope not.

Posted Jan 23, 2007 20:50 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmm, this smells believable to me, but how do you know this? Are you thinking of (for example) the Apache Foundation as "old UNIX/BSD guard" and GNU Classpath/GCJ as "Linux Users". I know the X story in more detail and I guess that one sorta rings true, since the deliberate addition of "old BSD license" style GPL incompatability was the straw breaking that particular camel's back. Although I rather suspect OpenBSD would have tossed it out, along with many others.

Perhaps I'm just doubting how much you can consider FSF-style worldviews and development groups as conjoined with Linux users. Which I suppose is a boring old saw, although it will probably end up being very important over time.

Too late? I hope not.

Posted Jan 23, 2007 21:55 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

I followed the Java story more closely myself. At one point SUN started saying things like "Java people feel JCP is open enough, but it's still not good enough for many Linux distributions and we need Java there too, so we'll bite the full GPL bullet like GNU Classpath"

In fact they found themselves attacked as soon as the deal was announced both by IBM/Motorola/Intel (wanted BSD/Apache) and a lot of Java developers (what's the deal with GPL, you've been teaching us for years Java didn't need it, we don't care about Linux commies, etc).

The Linux market had everything to do with the opening of Java (with .Net helping SUN to come to its senses)