Sun: All Java Belongs To Us - Comments On The JDocs.com Crisis
Hello,
As a flollow up to the posting titled "Sun Tells
Javalobby To Pull All Sun Java APIs Off jdocs.com"
allow me to highlight some comments on Sun's latest
efforts to crush the Java community and assert
control.
Casey Marshall comments:
Sun stepped up this week and boldly defended their
copyrights, thereby ensuring that their precious
programming language and the "business model" they've
built around it won't be subverted by those pesky
users trying to build communities.
I'm not surprised by Sun's actions. They have
consistently proven that Java isn't something they
want anyone else to have any modicum of control over.
JCP participants have no power equalling theirs;
licensees of their technology have no meaningful
rights to use that code; testers can't extend â?? or
even publish the results of â?? conformance or quality
tests. And now you can't republish their API
specification, because "its business interests are not
served" by doing that.
Of course, there are countless things that don't serve
the business interests of corporations, but exist
anyway as a matter of law, because they benefit
society at large. Yeah, so Sun has the High Right and
Mighty Copyright over their documentation, and if
moneyed interests have their way, will retain them for
a few millennia. But why is that copyright useful when
they distribute the material for no charge, and don't
even get advertising revenue from it? *
What I am surprised at is the Java programmer
community â?? whatever community exists on places like
JavaLobby â?? and their insistence in not dumping Sun
in favor of free alternatives. I only hope that
eventually stunts like this inspire deeper thought
about the issue, in preference to mimicry of the party
line about forking codebases.
(* Of course, we're then left with the prospect that
if 2005 and Java 5.0 don't work to Sun's advantage, we
may well see a day when your API documentation has a
liberal helping of banner ads.)
Source:
http://metastatic.org/text/concern/2004/08/19#bad-faith
Scott Ganyo comments:
Wakeup call & call to action
I have always been an ardent Sun supporter of their
right to do whatever they want with the Java platform.
I have even argued against making Java a "standard"
for various reasons I won't rehash here. But now we
have a clear, unmistakable message from Sun that tells
us what we already know... yet would often very much
like to forget: Sun is a business, not a community or
benevolent developers' organization. So, this should
serve as a wake-up call for all Java developers: Sun
will (and must!) do what is in it's own best interest,
which is not necessarily that of the Java developers.
On the other hand, let me be clear on a second point
as well: Java developers are, in many ways, a
community. I see at the top of my page that there are
some 121,791 members of the Javalobby. This includes
some of the most influential and outspoken Java
developers. Sun's decision on this will stir up
negative feelings, fear, and doubt about Sun's
stewardship of Java within and outside of the Java
development community. Add this to the existing
movement of those who already don't trust Sun and are
calling for an open source Java and Sun may have just
stirred the pot of discontent a bit. We must believe
that Sun has considered this, but perhaps those that
made the decision haven't fully appreciated the
negativity that will be generated by it.
So, I suggest we show them. I'm calling for a petition
to be created to show Sun that this is not a good
decision for them. I'm calling for everyone that
publishes or blogs to help generate interest in this
discussion. We are a lobby, are we not? Let's lobby.
Mark Wielaard comments:
It will be interesting to see how jdocs.org can help
in the effort to create better documentation for GNU
Classpath. Everybody is of course free to use the GNU
Classpath API documentation for projects like
jdocs.org without asking for permission first. Just
follow the free software license we use for GNU
Classpath.
There is unfortunately no official specification of
the core libraries for the java programming language
(when we started the GNU Classpath project Sun
promised to work together with the ISO and later the
ECMA groups to create real specifications for the
libraries. As you most probably know this never
happened.) This indeed makes it difficult to
successfully implement and document the APIs in a way
that is compatible with other implementations. So we
make sure that we not only read the publicly available
documentation published on the web, but more
importantly that we get access to real books
describing the way developers actually expect the APIs
to work. O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley have published a
couple of books that clearly describe what programmers
using the core libraries for the java programming
language can use and how these APIs are expected to
work.
Besides creating a implementation of the core class
library and (hopefully superior) documentation we are
also work on our own free software testsuite Mauve.
Mauve has tens of thousands of tests for the core
library. The goal is the have at least one test for
every method in every class. We have not yet reached
that goal, but we are making steady progresss and
people helping out to make sure our implementations is
as bugfree as possible. (The kaffe developers with
which we work closely together have asked a couple of
times for the "official" JDK TCK to run against kaffe
under acceptable GPL compatible terms, but they have
never gotten a strait answer from Sun about this in
the last 6 months.)
Source:
http://www.javalobby.org/thread.jspa?threadID=13951
- Gerald
--------------------
Gerald Bauer
Viva! Free Java Now Campaign |
http://viva.sourceforge.net
The Java Republic |
http://viva.sourceforge.net/republic
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