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by: Bernard Teo








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Bernard Teo
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Wed 14 Apr 2004

James Gosling on the Java Road

Category : Commentary/ontheJavaRoad.txt

My cousin, Edwin, who works for Sun, writes me this note, "Sun is a great company. Not many company (Apple excluded) shares this kind of belief and passion. Sometimes, many comments by people are unreasonable. On one hand, they say the company is doomed because it seems to not follow mainstream, next it wants to see more profitability, next the same criticise that we are a separatists because we don't do MS, next we should opensource our IP in Java, finally being the largest open source contributor after UCBerkeley, yet accused of being proprietary."

He sent me this : James Gosling : On the Java Road.

I like this paragraph in the James Gosling (creator of Java) article :

"As for Richard Stallman's Free but shackled: The Java trap , it's hard to know where to begin. He has his own rather peculiar definition of "Free" that I think violates the First Law of Thermodynamics (energy is conserved): developers put a huge amount of energy into creating software and if they can't get that energy back in a way that balances, then the system falls apart. I've been in this discussion countless times and I'd like to avoid landing there again. GPL software is not "free": it comes with a license that has a strong political agenda. Like GPL software, the Java platform is "free" in many senses: you don't have to pay anything for the runtime or developers kit and you can get the sources for everything. Unlike GPLd software, the Java sources don't come with a viral infection clause that requires you to apply the GPL to your own code. But the sources for the JDK do come with a license that has a different catch: redistribution requires compatibility testing."

-- "He (Richard Stallman) has his own rather peculiar definition of "Free" that I think violates the First Law of Thermodynamics (energy is conserved) ... GPL software is not "free": it comes with a license that has a strong political agenda."

-- "Developers put a huge amount of energy into creating software and if they can't get that energy back in a way that balances, then the system falls apart."

As they used to say in Marvin Gaye's time, right on...

Posted at 11:06AM UTC | permalink

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