>>>This guy thinks Sun shouldn't have sued:
zdnet.com
<<<
He seems to understand most of the terms of the engagement from a product standpoint, but his conclusions are no better than the average of what I read here on SI. He could have gotten the whole article by sampling this thread at random, in fact.
As far as his legal opinions go - forget it. Given Microsoft's last few moves, I'm feeling I may have been wrong to root for Sun turning this stuff over to a standards body so soon. The only way to move Microsoft at all seems to be with the legal system, and if Java has been handed over to the public there's nobody to sue them.
It could still be okay if there were antitrust people at Justice with the cohones to stand up to the politicians, but there aren't, and that's that. So, all we have left are Sun's lawyers and the Judiciary to hold Java together, at the moment.
Because of all this the Java support in the Netscape browser's next version(s) gets more critical. If they can't run the new JDK with full 1.2 support.... bad, very very bad. It doesn't help that they haven't forthrightly announced that. I know Netscape doesn't want to be negatively affected by the chaotic JDK development process, but if Sun would commit to having 1.2 in the next Netscape browser publicly it would sure pick up some spirits out here. Sometimes it seems like when our sides spinmasters run out of cutesy coffee-related names for things they don't know what to do anymore to maintain momentum.
I am like a lot of people - I have gone as far with Applets as I want to for now, given I can't actually put a modern (full JDK1.1 or 1.2) applet on my web site until Netscape supports it. And I haven't got a project for which Java applications would be appropriate right now. It's just not as easy to come up with those, given the ever-changing state of Java, even though applications can be finished and put on the market. YOu would need an idea for which Java is particularly appropriate, e.g. web parallelism. And applets, for which I have a thousand ideas, can't be put on my web site because Netscape and IE both have inadequate support right now. So I'm just sitting here, and need to start doing something else.
Microsoft is hitting them with baby taps but they seem to have confused them nevertheless.
Chaz |
