Andrew Pollack's Blog
Technology, Family, Entertainment, Politics, and Random Noise| Professional Services | Second Signal | Presentations | Andrew's Blog | Support |
How is Sun's monopoly different from Microsoft's?
By Andrew Pollack on 10/03/2003 at 09:40 PM EDTStill harping on this. Sorry, if you're sick of it you can skip this one.
In order to run a windows application, you must load windows. well, there are things like WINE and the emulators for the Macintosh, but mostly you need Windows to run a Windows app. That's why its a monopoly -- they only a controlling share of that market.
Fine.
In order to run Java, you must have a JVM. Nobody can make a JVM but Sun. Microsoft made one, and Sun sued them. How is that different? Is the JVM standards based? Who set the standard? What body controlls it? Sure, Sun says you can roll your own -- but if you do there is NOTHING in the licensing that says Sun can't go ahead and change the specification or come out with a rev. that you can't attain because of something about how you built yours.
The advantage to using Java as your programming language is, by definition, that Sun has a monopoly on it and that tends to mean that if you write something corectly it should run in the same version of the JVM anywhere. Hm, that makes the JVM the operating system, doesn't it? By definition, isn't the JVM performing all the roles of the operating system?
I don't get how you can call that standards based.
Of course, that said, I spent time today writing an agent in Java -- it was the right place to write it, and it just took a little extra time to deal with less familliar syntax. Otherwise, fine. It ran. Big deal.
Thank you.
Oddly enough, while I'm out there ranting -- I actually used java for a couple
of important bits of code this week. Why? LotusScript has no real networking
capability built in as libraries, so I'd have had to call MS Foundation stuff
and lots of other strange things.
It seems like java gets to win, because more people use it so more people
create libraries for it so more people use it, etc... Like it or not.
By "Standards Based" I'm beginning to believe that it's just a way of saying
IBM doesn't have to create a language and pay to keep it up to date. Same with
their server. No need for a creating solution, we'll just implement the same
thing as everyone else and try to use our own leverage of other stuff to
justify the market share.
I don't like where this is going, but I'll use what I have to, solving problems
for customers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
in response to
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some corrections; Sun successfully sued Micro$oft for signing a contract with
Sun and then not abiding by the terms, not for creating a JVM. More than Sun
have created JVMs; IBM made "the" JVM for x86 Linux for a while although Sun
is putting more effort into Linux now. I suspect that IBM did the JVMs for z
and i series. I suspect that some of the JVMs written for cell-phones and PDAs
were not written by Sun. Sun has made progress in opening up Java with the Java
Community Process http://www.jcp.org. While not everything one would desire,
IMHO it is significantly more community input and standards process than
Microsoft. One of the reasons that you can say that Microsoft has a monopoly is
that they have been so adjucated by a US court as part of its convictions. :-)
Monopolies are defined in terms of the market and that is usually the key
question in antitrust trials; e.g., Ford is the exclusive provider of Ford
cars, but if the court defines the market as automobiles, then they do not have
a monopoly. IANAL, but i suspect that Sun's lawyers could define the market
into something they did not dominate. in response to Still harping on this.
Other Recent Stories...
- 01/26/2023Better Running VirtualBox or VMWARE Virtual Machines on Windows 10+ Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. I has been nearly 3 years since my last blog entry. The truth is, I haven't had much to say that was worthy of more than a basic social media post -- until today. For my current work, I was assigned a new laptop. It's a real powerhouse machine with 14 processor cores and 64 gigs of ram. It should be perfect for running my development environment in a virtual machine, but it wasn't. VirtualBox was barely starting, and no matter how many features I turned off, it could ......
- 04/04/2020How many Ventilators for the price of those tanks the Pentagon didn't even want?This goes WAY beyond Trump or Obama. This is decades of poor planning and poor use of funds. Certainly it should have been addressed in the Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan administrations -- all of which were well aware of the implications of a pandemic. I want a military prepared to help us, not just hurt other people. As an American I expect that with the ridiculous funding of our military might, we are prepared for damn near everything. Not just killing people and breaking things, but ......
- 01/28/2020Copyright Troll WarningThere's a copyright troll firm that has automated reverse-image searches and goes around looking for any posted images that they can make a quick copyright claim on. This is not quite a scam because it's technically legal, but it's run very much like a scam. This company works with a few "clients" that have vast repositories of copyrighted images. The trolls do a reverse web search on those images looking for hits. When they find one on a site that looks like someone they can scare, they work it like ......
- 03/26/2019Undestanding how OAUTH scopes will bring the concept of APPS to your Domino server
- 02/05/2019Toro Yard Equipment - Not really a premium brand as far as I am concerned
- 10/08/2018Will you be at the NYC Launch Event for HCL Domino v10 -- Find me!
- 09/04/2018With two big projects on hold, I suddenly find myself very available for new short and long term projects.
- 07/13/2018Who is HCL and why is it a good thing that they are now the ones behind Notes and Domino?
- 03/21/2018Domino Apps on IOS is a Game Changer. Quit holding back.
- 02/15/2018Andrew’s Proposed Gun Laws
Sun successfully sued Micro$oft for signing a contract with Sun and then not
abiding by the terms, not for creating a JVM.
More than Sun have created JVMs; IBM made "the" JVM for x86 Linux for a while
although Sun is putting more effort into Linux now. I suspect that IBM did the
JVMs for z and i series. I suspect that some of the JVMs written for
cell-phones and PDAs were not written by Sun.
Sun has made progress in opening up Java with the Java Community Process
http://www.jcp.org. While not everything one would desire, IMHO it is
significantly more community input and standards process than Microsoft.
One of the reasons that you can say that Microsoft has a monopoly is that they
have been so adjucated by a US court as part of its convictions. :-)
Monopolies are defined in terms of the market and that is usually the key
question in antitrust trials; e.g., Ford is the exclusive provider of Ford
cars, but if the court defines the market as automobiles, then they do not have
a monopoly. IANAL, but i suspect that Sun's lawyers could define the market
into something they did not dominate.
:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
in response to
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still harping on this.