Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: wiley murray who wrote (10904)	8/19/1998 5:36:00 PM
From: Ed Yander	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

Torvalds sure ripped apart Java and Sun in the Sunworld interview: sunworld.com SW: What are your thoughts on Java? LT: I think everybody hates Java as a desktop thing. I see Java mentioned a lot lately, but all of the mentions within the last year have been of Java as a server language, not as a desktop language. If you go back a year and a half, everybody was talking about Java on the desktop. They aren't anymore. It's dead. And once you're dead on the desktop, my personal opinion is you're dead. If servers are everything you have, just forget it. Why do you think Sun, HP -- everybody -- is nervous about Microsoft? It's not because they make great servers. It's because they control the desktop. Once you control the desktop, you control the servers. It's no longer something that will revolutionize the industry. It could have revolutionized the industry if it was on the desktop, but I don't see that happening anymore. I hope I'm wrong. Really. I just don't think I am. SW: How did Sun blow it? LT: Too much noise, too much talk, too much discussion, not enough "show me." SW: So Sun's credibility is shot? LT: It's the credibility. It's also the fact that their implementations were bad. So you have people like HP who just decided that, "Hey, I can do a better implementation. I don't need Sun anymore." Or you have people like Microsoft who decide, "Okay, let's do our own extensions." And because the Sun implementation isn't good enough to carry Java on its own, the Microsoft extensions actually make sense to people. And it's just not compelling enough for anybody to switch. Sun has done this right in the past. Sun did it right with NFS. NFS became the standard because NFS was the only game in town at the time. It was freely available; things like that. NFS is a really crappy standard, but, I mean, it's there. And Java could have been a standard. But in order to get a standard that actually stands up to something, you have to get it onto enough machines that nobody can come in with a competing standard -- which means that you really have to execute on it. I could be wrong. There are people writing Java, but there are a lot of people who gave up on Java. I think Corel is the biggest example. Essentially I see the Java engine just slipping, not going anywhere. And I really hate that happening because Java could have been a big boost to Linux. SW: Didn't the Linux community have a difficult relationship with JavaSoft? LT: This is part of why I think Java has died. Instead of just leveraging off the Linux base that really wanted to have Java working, they just made it hard for the Linux base to get Java working. I know that there were people who had sources available and were able to do JVM [Java virtual machine] binaries. They all came out for Linux, but they came out two months late. And nobody got to play with the sources. Nobody got to fix the problems. So right now there are still people working on Java for Linux, but most of them seem to have given up on the Sun implementations. They're using Kaffe and writing their own libraries. The group in charge of Java at Sun had some licensing problems for the Linux version [of the Java Development Kit] and for two or three months it looked like the JDK from Sun wouldn't even be available. And that made a lot of Linux people really unhappy and pissed off at Sun. Those licensing fee issues were finally clarified, but the damage had been done. ----------------------------- Torvalds doesn't want to see Java succeed because Linux success is closely tied to its popularity on Intel hardware. Since Java is a Sun (soon to taken over by IBM) invention it is controlled by anti-Intel forces. Sun's phony support of Linux (Oh gee, we love Linux! Yeah right) is just as transparent as Torvalds desire to see Java succeed.