Re: [ecf-dev] Gosling: Java source code already available

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pete Mackie wrote:

Gosling: Java source code already available
The current model for Java is close to an
open source model, the technology’s father said

Unfortunately, close only counts in 'horse shoes and hand grenades'...not in licensing  :)

..n
As far as the possibility of Sun joining the Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling, Gosling would not support this. Sun and Microsoft remain perhaps the only two major technology vendors who are not part of Eclipse.

"It would be a big step down. NetBeans was an open source project a long time before Eclipse ever came out," Gosling said.

Perhaps true that Netbeans has been 'around' longer...but I think it's clear that Eclipse has had more success than NetBeans at creating a community and an ecosystem for tools and other applications.

The Eclipse endorsement of the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) destroyed that organization's interoperability story, according to Gosling.

By this, I think he must mean UI/multi-platform story...not interoperability in the communications sense...since none of that depends upon SWT at all.

"It’s a toolkit based on the Windows API and getting it to run on other platforms is problematic," he said.

This statement is sort of belied by the Linux, Solaris, Mac, AIX, HP-UX drops available here

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/S-3.2RC3-200605051306/index.php

Given this, I guess I don't understand what he means by 'getting it to run on other platforms'.  I have a lot of respect for Gosling, but I suspect he may be a little bitter at the success of Eclipse, SWT, RCP, etc. relative to Netbeans.

Scott