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Date: Fri, 19 May 2006 11:56:58 -0700
From: Stefano Mazzocchi <stefano@apache.org>
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To: harmony-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: So today Sun announced...
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Chris Gray wrote:
> Geir,
> 
> I'll grant you that Sun could handle the Java community much worse than they 
> do, but I still don't agree that having such a corporation in charge is a 
> Good Thing. Or maybe I'm just being old-fashioned, and we should get rid of 
> all those fuddy-duddy organisations like IETF or W3C and replace them by 
> dynamic share-holder-value-driven corporations. :-)

Chris,

evolutions are more effective than resolutions because they are more
easily reversible and if we apply basic thermodynamical principles to
complex systems (including social ones), entropy (aka disorder)
increases only when there are irreversible changes.

Apache has been able to achieve many wonderful things with very high
social energy efficiency because of the above (which is easier to do
when you have a volunteer organization full of naturally lazy people, I
must say).

I have not participated in the Java SE expert group at the JCP, but I
know the people from Apache that had.

Harmony is not about changing the way Java specs are designed or cooked,
or whether or not that's good or bad. That's another story and it's a
completely separate concern which doesn't really belong here.

We are deeply thankful to Sun for having slowly but surely continued to
open up Java at evolutionary steps and the collective wealth generated
by this was tremendous (some Sun's stock owners would have liked to have
a share of that wealth, but that's life)

I owe Sun a lot for that and my push for Harmony is to help them back,
realizing that there is a lot that can be gained by harvesting that
wealth that they helped generating, and not a lot to lose.

There is no need for an hostile takeover to a company that was rarely
hostile in the first place.

No, I'm not in love with the JCP, the java IP situation, the TCK NDA,
the lack of Swing TCK and a bunch of other issues, but could be a lot worse.

Our goal here is to get Harmony certified.

What happens after that is honestly a little premature to forecast, but
a JVM built by the java people for the java people can only go in one
direction: compatibility.

The ASF has a 8-years-old continuous record of that.

Now, let's go back to let the code speak.

-- 
Stefano.


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