>
> Secondly, the vote is only against
> SUNW having the rights to dictate standards.
>
I think the "right to be a submitter of a publicly available
specification" is the more accurate term. With the usual
process, the standards process can be used to subvert useful
ideas to the point of being useless in the name of trying to
achieve "consensus". Bluntly, I think Sun was suspicious of
Microsoft & friends. Other companies are suspicious of a
private for-profit entity (Sun) being in control of defining
a standard which it can presumably use against them (a reasonable
issue).
Once the standard is submitted, I think others are allowed to
participate in changing it but if the change is to the point of
"breaking" it (violating "write once, run anywhere" promise),
Sun wanted (not sure how) a veto right. In practice,
friends-of-Java (Sun, IBM etc) were for it and friends-of-Windows
(Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard) against it.
In my personal opinion, Sun's fears of subversion of standards
process to produce a warped useless "standard Java" was justified
give what Microsoft did - adding new methods to a langauge class
inherently violating "write once, run anywhere". And I personally
do not care if the Sun legal contract was less-than-bulletproof..
in my opinion if Microsoft wanted to just add new methods, they could
have used a sub-class. Adding methods to the language class is the
way to redefine the language (in a non-portable manner).
This just may mean Java does not get to be a "de-jure" standard
blessed by an international beaurocracy. It still has a chance
as a "de-facto". standard. Not being a "de-jure" standard does
not seem to have hurt Windows. We will see what becomes of Java. |
