The value of native java

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Hi,

I won't quote your post because I disagree with pretty much all of it, and
I don't expect you to understand my answers. You display a deep and basic
misunderstanding of what Free Software in general and Fedora in particular
are. Here is some food for thoughts :

1. item one : trusting "moral compacts" (or not). The free software
movement was launched by people who felt betrayed by proprietary software
vendors, which switched rules without warning because it suited them.
They've learnt the hard way "moral compacts" are worth nothing when not
backed by legal documents, if Sun wants people to commit on its tech it
needs to commit itself first.

2. item 2 : as SCO née Caldera shows, using rationality to predict
proprietary software companies policies is a deep mistake

3. item 3 : Sun in particular has an habit of performing 180° policy
changes every few years (x86 Solaris anyone) you'd be mad to rely on them.
Besides, Sun corporate culture is not Linux-friendly

4. item 4 : Free Software does not have a startup-like short-term horizon.
GNU/Linux didn't get there in months, so what if some release sucks we'll
get it right in the end.

5. item 5 : Red Hat Linux and later Fedora have always been more commited
than most of the Linux market to Free Software. All people who (like you)
thought it was a marketing mistake, and predicted <instert name of foolish
distro which made compromises with closed vendors like Sun> Linux would
bury Red Hat were proved wrong by the market. Go convince someone else,
we'll bury them like the others.

Eclipse already rules the Java IDE market (see Borland corporate plans)
Proprietary J2EE vendors are feeling the heat of Tomcat, Geronimo and
JBoss (see Oracle+JBoss, IBM+Gluecode, BEA moving up the foodchain with
Aqualogic).
The next step is the JVM and Fedora inclusion shows it won't be too long
to come.

At this point in time it would be madness for any closed software vendor
to wed itself too tightly to Sun Java, let alone for a FOSS actor like
Fedora. If you really think corporate might is sufficient to capture the
IT market I invite you to reflect on Itanium fate.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot