5. If Oracle now wants to ... change the rules ... they are free to
do so by making a clear and unequivocal pronouncement to that effect.
No.
It's not just systems implementers like Google that
relied on this statement. In fact, that's the least of the effort wasted on
this "open" system. Programmers everywhere invested enormous amounts of time
and effort, not only learning and programming for this system, but
(as we have seen), in many cases contributing back to it. All on the
assumption that those skills and code would be useful in many contexts in the
future, because Java was open.
To focus on the relatively small
damage to current competitors to Java ignores the multitude of programmers who
believed that Sun meant what they said, and invested heavily based on the
promise that Java would be truly open, and thus useful in the future even if Sun
lost interest or sold out.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|