Miscellaneous

I haven’t had much time to write lately, but thought I’d point out a few things that caught my eye recently. First up, a little something from Eric S Raymond. Apart from being a particularly poorly worded letter (hint: try being nice to people when you want them to give you millions of dollars worth of source code), it’s full of some really odd comments.

Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun’s when I just checked. Last I checked the pricing of shares on the stock market was only an indicator of the value of the company when taken with the number of shares available in the country. Thus, whether or not Sun’s share price is above or below Red Hat’s is largely irrelevant. Nor is Red Hat a good comparison when talking about Java. Red Hat makes money from selling it’s support services, there’s already a massive wealth of professional Java support services and training available that aren’t provided by Sun, whereas Red Hat is the only support provider would consider for a Red Hat server. This is particularly so because you rarely need to fix a crisis in Java itself, but rather in your Java code – Sun has no better knowledge of your code than any other Java expert.

You have millions of potential allies out here in the open-source community who would love to become Java developers and users if it didn’t mean ceding control of their future to Sun. Ceding control of their futures?? Since when has any programmer worth his salt only invested in one programming language? The fate of Java programmers doesn’t lie with Sun, but rather in the hands of people who employ Java programmers, just as the fate of C programmers lies in the hands of people who employ C programmers. There’s no use in having an opensource codebase if noone uses the programming language anymore, and no programmer in his right mind would take on maintaining a programming language on his own just to avoid having to learn a new one. When employers stop employing C programmers, people stop learning C, people stop working on C compilers, C programmers gradually die out. See any of the other old languages which (while still in use in places) are gradually being phased out. Matthew Langham commented:

In fact in the future we will have to get used to the fact that traditional operating system companies such as Microsoft and Apple offer products for other systems than their own. Apple already offers iTunes for Windows and no doubt will soon be offering other products in the i-range on Microsoft’s operating system. Don’t count on it Matthew. iTunes for Windows exists solely to push the iTunes Music Store – not because Apple particularly wanted to build software for Windows. As long as Apple is developing MacOS, you won’t see iMovie, iDVD or GarageBand for Windows – they’re key elements of Apple’s marketing strategy for differentiating Macs. If it weren’t for AOL messenger, you’d probably see iChat for Windows though, because it makes sense – iChat is far more useful when everyone can use it. Noone cares if they are the only person in the world using iMovie. This was good news. I’m not a huge devotee of Gump, but it does strike me as seriously cool to have nightly integration builds for every opensource project, and this is a step towards that with projects outside of Apache taking an interest and participating in the Gump phenomenon. Some interesting features of Java 1.5 were pointed out by Nicola Ken Barrozzi. I look forward to using them in 10-15 years time when customers stop complaining if I don’t support Java 1.4 and below. I’ve managed to draw the line at Java 1.3 at the moment and at this stage I don’t think I’ll ever be able to move to Java 1.4. Someone *please* update Netscape and IE on OS X to use Java 1.4! Ted Leung comments:

People seem to believe that they have the right to call you simply because you have a telephone. Personally, I *do* have a phone so people can call me… Oh and because I wanted to play with bluetooth… and the games are cool… come to think of it, noone calls me anyway… Maybe Ted’s right…