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The down side of open sourcing Java

Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on November 29, 2006

Sun vice president and fellow Graham Hamilton has apparently left sun over their open sourcing of Java.

Hamilton, who in the past spearheaded Sun's work on compliance, interoperability and portability in Java sees the open sourcing of the platform as a bad thing because it erodes the technical uniformity of the platform, by allowing others to build incompatible versions. He is, of course, right. Open sourcing Java will allow third parties to fork the platform, but I have no doubt that the network effect would cause these to wither and die.

cheers, stuart


 
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