As you may know, a group led by Clay Shirky and Tim O’Reilly has issued a challenge to the manufacturers of Intel-compatible personal computers — put the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) on all new PCs.
The call to arms is a result of Microsoft’s supposed liberalization of its licensing practices, allowing PC makers more flexibility in what they can put on their desktops; and Microsoft’s announcement this week that it’s removing Java support from the next version of Windows it ships.
Yesterday’s eJournal discussed this idea. Today, Slashdot linked to it, sparking the usual amazing discussion.
Two of the replies, which Clay noted in an e-mail, are particularly pertinent.
I also heard from Adam “Proudly Serving” Barr, who said:
My argument is not 100% serious, but really you could take what people
said about the browser and say it about Java: It’s bad that Microsoft bundles
Java with the OS, removing Java will create a robust environment for
different Java VM implementations to flourish, people can easily download
free Java runtimes off the net, and so on.But then you say you want everyone to have one single VM for consistency.
So why is it then bad to have one single browser for consistency? You could
argue that in the market for Java VMs, Sun is a monopoly, and they are using
that monopoly to extend their control of other parts of computing etc etc etc etc.
There are two fairly easy answer to this. First, Sun isn’t the only company doing JVMs — IBM does an excellent job on this.
That’s a cop-out, of course. Ultimately we don’t want to remain in today’s current write-once-debug-everywhere world of Java applets. We need stability and consistency.
I guess I’d rather see two monopolists — actual and wannabe in this case — offering their APIs to the world. That’s a better alternative than what we have today.
Looks like the next move is up to Sun, which is also known for its control-freak behavior and desire to lock in users on its own stuff. Should Java go open source? That would help. I won’t hold my breath.
By the way, several /. posters pointed out that I was pointing to JRE 1.2, not 1.3. That’s fixed now. The Web’s feedback mechanism is a wonderful phenomenon…