Re: [PLUG] Re: Well, its official -- Sun is serious about being anti Linux and Open Source

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

Why is it that when someone slanders Linux and BSD, you people are
up in arms, but when they slander a traditional Unix company, you're
ready to cut anchor and make for the Spanish Main?

Good grief.

On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 04:41:37PM -0500, FloydLJohnsonIII@aol.com wrote:
> Is the state of affairs at Sun to imply that I shouldn't make
> too much of an investment in acquring Java skills?

You should make an investment in acquiring Java skills precisely if
and when someone's going to pay you to use them. If they won't do
you any good, you shouldn't ever acquire them. If they will do you
some good, you should acquire them. What you would learn by learning
Java has nothing at all to do with Sun, since there are plenty of
people making JVMs that are not-Sun and plenty of devices (think,
cell phones) that are completely dependent on the platform.

> That "wasted time" scenario is based on the notion of the platform
> getting absorbed into ActiveX/.NET or otherwise co-opted into
> extinction within two years.

There's been no official suggestion that Java would be absorbed into
.NET (I don't understand who you could imagine that it was possible
to absorb Java into ActiveX... perhaps you're confusing Java and
JavaScript? Only the names are similar), merely that they would be
made compatible. A variety of programming languages are already
comaptible with .NET besides C#. I wouldn't call any of them
"absorbed", and I certainly wouldn't call them "extinct".

> If things aren't that bad, then who will carry the Java 2 flag
> should Sun fall?

Sun isn't going to fall any time soon. They've got a tremendously
large installed user base running Oracle on Solaris with Veritas
Volume Manager. None of those companies are likely to blithly switch
to Windows or Linux any time soon. Not only would doing so not be a
monetary gain (to get the same levels of I/O that they are on the
Sun hardware, they'd have to spend just as much on IA32 or IA64
hardware), but they'd have to spend a tremendous amount of money to
perform the migration.

I can't even get people to migrate a production database system from
Solaris 7 to Solaris 9, and I sure as hell can't get them to move
from Oracle 8 (which is TOTALLY UNSUPPORTED right now) to Oracle 9.

Sun isn't going anywhere any time soon. Please, relax.

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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