[conspire] Christian draws out a Sun Microsystems guy

[Don Marti]

begin  Rick Moen quotation of Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 07:01:56PM -0700:

> And he's _very_ keen, in mentioning this, to completely sidestep the
> point of controversy:  Sun choose a JRE-dependent database project,
> while they _could_ have, instead, put just a bit of further development
> work into using the C-coded (and much faster) sqlite database engine,
> instead.  In making that decision, Sun ignored without comment numerous
> pleas and petitions from people in the open source community, including
> me.

Red Hat made Eclipse run without Java.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7413

Ximian shipped a fairly heavily modified OO.o
years ago.

> The more significant point is that, very likely, Sun is aiming to ship a
> OO.o 2.0 that is proprietary-software-dependent in exactly the same way
> those MUAs are -- which is why he didn't give you a straight answer to
> your question.  (Basically, I expect that the Java-dependent 2.0
> "enhancements" will be broken for anyone who doesn't load Sun's JRE,
> but other parts of OO.o will still work.  Thanks for nothing, Simon.)

I predict a quietly "cleaned up" de-JREd release
that runs a little faster than the official one.
RHAT and NOVL aren't both going to make their products
dependent on the competition.  If dependency on a
competitor and its sort-of-free, "open" platform
weren't a problem, Sun wouldn't have bought out its
UNIX license.

-- 
Don Marti
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org