Comments on: GPL + Sun + Java = Try Before You Buy?

By: Ken Gilmer

Ken Gilmer — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:17:09 +0000

Hi Bruce,
Yes I agree both Android and Squawk are interesting projects. Have you looked into OpenJDK recently? There are now ARM builds that may be suitable for your targets. Despite the FOSS traps in PMEA (JDBC, HTTPS) we have had good experience with the performance and reliability of the JVM.

cheers
ken

By: Bruce Boyes

Bruce Boyes — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:42:53 +0000

Ken, I share your frustration. We were hoping to be using Sun Squawk in a line of commercial products and ran into the same issues as you… I have to wonder if Android is more what you really want, for the reasons detailed in the mail archives here: https://android.dev.java.net/ – but of course Android wasn’t quite available when you were launching. Or Sun Squawk (although they have the same licensing issues as phoneME). Squawk and Android are very different, and Squawk is very different from phoneME. I’ll be blogging more about all this at http://techbleat.blogspot.com/ in the coming days. My interest is to determine what (if anything) my company should be using in future products.

best regards
Bruce Boyes

By: Ken

Ken — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:15:16 +0000

Hi Doug, yeah a friend send that to me earlier today. Certainly interesting! Looks like there is a lot of activity with small Java these days.

By: Doug Jones

Doug Jones — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:03:55 +0000

Might want to take a look at this:

http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/

“Dalvik: how Google routed around Sun’s IP-based licensing restrictions on Java ME”

By: Mehrshad Mansouri

Mehrshad Mansouri — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:07:08 +0000

Hey Michael,

These are great questions and thanks for your kind words. We’re actually planning to address these points in a forthcoming blog post. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Cheers, -m

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:48:32 +0000

And to be clear. I hope all the best for your company.

I worked at a software company for years. I understand that MS dominated and people grew angry at pricing.

I’m just trying to understand the trends today. I cashed out years ago. Thankfully, no more specs, mods and production deadlines.

all the best, I think this is a great idea.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:44:13 +0000

I am curious. Why do hardware people get to charge money, but software gets criticized?

Are you going to give your products away for free?

Open source, but charge for service?

Open hardware, but charge for service?

Just curious, not trying to be rude. I understood why the original movement took off, but then I see that everyone is making a buck anyway, or asking for money in donations.

Maybe I do not understand the pricing structure for Sun.

Are you going to give away anything for free?

Maybe we should demand free cars too

By: TinkerTim

TinkerTim — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:51:34 +0000

Hi,
while you try to talk things out with Jonathan Schwartz, I suggest that you read this:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/on_patent_trolling#comment-1189375129000
and remind him of it as well.

And sure as hell, I’m waiting for the pricing to be put up! This sounds a bit like a Finnish University student’s favourite project that started about 16 years ago!

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:48:00 +0000

I don’t expect you’ll get a resolution of this from Sun anytime soon. There seems to be a lot of division inside Sun about open-sourcing Java. My sense is that the only reason they’ve done it is to try and convince the linux/gnu/oss crowd to write in Java instead of .net via mono. But they can’t bring themselves to go the whole way.

By: Dalibor Topic

Dalibor Topic — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:03:40 +0000

I think that all components of a JSR should be open source, and I’d like to see the JCP mandate it in the future. Unfortunately, we’re far, far away from a majority in the EC supporting that idea (or even a minority .

But that’s something to work on in the next couple of years.