Re: The future of Java

From:
Tom Anderson <twic@urchin.earth.li>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:21:17 +0000
Message-ID:
<alpine.DEB.1.10.0911201605140.2714@urchin.earth.li>
On Fri, 20 Nov 2009, Roedy Green wrote:

On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:34:11 +1100, "Qu0ll" <Qu0llSixFour@gmail.com>
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

http://infoworld.com/d/developer-world/java-what-does-its-future-hold-978?page=0,0


Sun has been an unusually generous company. I have often puzzled why a
corporation would give away so much.

Oracle has a much more rapacious philosophy -- lock the customers in
then apply the screws upping annual fees.


Although they're good to developers - developer licenses for their
products (the ones we use, which includes the big database, anyway) are
free. It's a sensible strategy: make it easy for developers to get
involved and build loads of stuff, then charge people who actually need to
use it.

This is exactly why Sun pushed java in the first place: they wanted
developers to write software in a language that would run on their
servers. Presumably, because they thought there was a threat that
Microsoft would get in with some proprietary language and lock them out,
or because they wanted to invade the space then held by IBM.

There is bound to be some friction between these two philosophies.


Yes. Sun were happy to give away the software for the production side -
you could get a production-quality software stack from Sun for free,
including OS, JVM and app server. If Sunacle applied their model to java,
then we'd see a free JVM and app server suitable for development, but not
for deployment - for that, you'd have to pay. Perhaps we'll see Sunacle
switch resources away from OpenJDK, and start maintaining a for-pay branch
which gets all the new performance goodies. Or just refuse to support the
free JDK in production environments; often, that's enough to persuade a
corporate user to stump up for a paid version.

tom

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