[PLUG] Speaking of the Termination of Distributions

Kyle Hayes kyle at silverbeach.net
Thu Oct 2 17:31:02 UTC 2003


On Thursday 02 October 2003 16:31, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> > I supose we could think of them as a distribution of Unix. An article by
> > ESR claiming Sun has gone from "troubled" to "doomed":
>
>   Germane to the concerns about OO.o and java: ouch!

Maybe.  Java may well be toast anyway because Sun never let it leave home.  
This has frustrated IBM and other companies that wanted to really push Java 
for years.   Losing its parent could kill it off completely.

I thought that OO.o was more or less independent from StarOffice now and that 
the code base was being hacked by a fairly independent group.

While MS may push C#, I'm not aware of any C# implementations that run on big 
non-Windows backend servers.  Mono is definitely not ready for any kind of 
prime time use.  On Windows platforms, C# will cannibalize VB and C++ more 
than Java I suspect.  Is anyone really deploying much Java on Windows these 
days (apart from the odd applet)?  I know most development of Java is done on 
Windows because that is where the good IDEs are, but deployment?

So, the shops that use Java will probably continue to do so provided that the 
licensing is handled by the company that buys it.  I cannot see Sun's 
management selling off anything to MS even in extremis. I'd guess that IBM 
will pick up Java and then throw it over the wall to some other organization.  
IBM makes a lot of money on Java.

There is also the point that Java on Linux has never been that strong, so if 
Linux is taking over the server world, Java really isn't in the picture 
anyway.

Productivity and Sun were the two reasons that made me shift away from Java 
coding four years ago.  I haven't felt that to be a mistake yet.

If Java sails off into the land where FORTAN and COBOL live, will universities 
still use Java as the primary instruction language in CS courses?

Best,
Kyle

P.S. is anyone else getting a bit nervous at this ongoing shakeout and 
consolidation of the computer hardware and software industry?  There are not 
many companies left.    The whitebox world is the only one I can think of 
where there is actually some competition and margins are so low I cannot see 
how that industry remains in business.




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