Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on March 20, 2005 08:31 AM
Now I'm going to ask you to use your imagination for a moment. This will be a stretch. You ready?
Pretend that you're an executive at Sun in charge of the decision of whether to open up Java under an Open Source or free software license. You do a bunch of research... what happen to the StarOffice project? The first thing you might discover is a bunch of posts like yours. Nobody gives Sun *any* credit for releasing StarOffice. In hindsight, they were forced to do it in reaction to a grave threat from Microsoft, and the code they released was horrible. An absolute travesty. In the meantime, hardly anybody buys StarOffice. Why should they, when there's a "better, free alternative" that "we" developed. (The term "we" itself requires a fair amount of imagination of course).
Don't you think you might conclude that the FOSS community would be talking the same way about Java and a forked Java code base a few years down the road? In other words, there's nothing in it for Sun.
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Re:Credit where credit is due. Or not.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on March 20, 2005 08:31 AMPretend that you're an executive at Sun in charge of the decision of whether to open up Java under an Open Source or free software license. You do a bunch of research... what happen to the StarOffice project? The first thing you might discover is a bunch of posts like yours. Nobody gives Sun *any* credit for releasing StarOffice. In hindsight, they were forced to do it in reaction to a grave threat from Microsoft, and the code they released was horrible. An absolute travesty. In the meantime, hardly anybody buys StarOffice. Why should they, when there's a "better, free alternative" that "we" developed. (The term "we" itself requires a fair amount of imagination of course).
Don't you think you might conclude that the FOSS community would be talking the same way about Java and a forked Java code base a few years down the road? In other words, there's nothing in it for Sun.
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