Kaffe's MS-Extensions Will Hurt Java

[Stefan Burstroem]

In article <199906242201.PAA41893 at bubba.whistle.com> you wrote:
>Mike Cornall writes:
>> This is a delightfully enticing argument. It's also utter nonsense.

><IMHO>
>That may be so (and not to sound too snotty), but where's your freely
>available, written-from-scratch JVM and class library??

>When I see it, then your comments will have the same significance
>for me as Tim's.. until then, talk is cheap.
></IMHO>

Let me just my add small comments to this...

Mike has a very good point saying that Open Source actually builds upon
public standards. Lets asume you have 2 Open Source projects, each one of
them implementing the same standard (for any reason, performance, size
whatever) If they didn't follow the public standard, the 2 Open Source
approaches would become incompatible. And they are still 'defined by the
people who use them'. In one single strike you made it impossible to move
back and forth between then in order to find the one that matches your
needs (other than 'meeting the standards')
The above comment is of course completely separated from Microsoft and may
not be as obvious to agree to or not.
However, when it comes to MS-extensions to Java, bear in mind that
Microsoft has stated that 'they are considering changing existing standards
such as samba just to stop open source implementations from working'

What do you think will happen when/if MicroSoft sees Kaffe's Java
implementation as a threat to them? Do you think they will even consider
that Kaffe actually might have helped them to spread their word? No way,
they will strike quickly and hard and the Kaffe people will have to go to
MS products just because they tied themselfes too close to MS-standards.

regards, Stefan Burstroem

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>> Irl: Stefan Burstroem <<  >> Omnipresence Intl. <<  >> Irc: Yabba <<
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