Blogging Roller

Granted that I have not really been following this story since the Apache Sun relationship first blew up, this sounds like an important story:

"Starting Tuesday, it will be mandatory that licenses provide for the possibility of a clean-room implementation," said Onno Kluyt, manager of the JCP Program Office. "A specification leader must offer a test suite independently of the reference implementation. It is required, going forward, that the test suite be available free of charge so that organizations like Apache don't face the hurdle of a license fee." [eWeek: Java Licensing Changes Will Open Door to Open Source]

In response to Russell's dot-net rantations, Kevin O'Neill and Rafe Colburn listed some advantages of Java and J2EE over C# and Dot-Net.  I agree with many of the points on those lists.  I think that Java's cross-platform portability and huge collection of competing open source and commercial dev tools, runtimes, and servers give Java a tremendous advantage.  Even with this advantage, Sun is going to have to push Java hard, fix the problems and open things up even more.