[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“Over the weekend, Info world reported that Sun has removed JAVA
from consideration by the European Computer manufacturers
association (ECMA). At issue, is the copyright question. Sun and
Microsoft are locked in a bitter court dispute over the JAVA
trademark. Sun doesn’t want to neutralize the court proceedings
because it transferred the copyright to a successor. In the
meantime, Microsoft wants to deliver the coup de grace when it
announced that it would radically improve JAVA. Of course, we’ve
experienced enough vaporware announcements over the years to ignore
this trite.”
“Sun’s removal of JAVA from consideration amply demonstrates
that the company just doesn’t understand Open standards let alone
Open source. If Sun truly understood Open standards, the company
would’ve realized that it gained more by opening than by owning the
software code. Further, if Sun also understood Open source, it
would’ve released JAVA under the GPL the moment that Microsoft
began to add its own proprietary extensions.“