Microsoft to Cut Java to Spite Sun (fwd)

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

| <http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&ncid=716&e=4&u=/ap/20020618/ap_on_hi_te/microsoft_antitrust_9>
|
| By 1/1/2004, Microsnot will have expunged Sun's Java completely from all of
| its machines and OSs for sale.
|
| No word on whether they spit in the antitrust judges' face at the same time.

Well, one could argue that this will  be  an  improvement.   Over  at
slashdot.org,  they've  had  a  discussion of the issue, in which the
main point seems to be that MS's  JVM  is  years  old  and  not  very
compatible with anyone else's.  This is almost certainly intentional,
so that MS customers learn how awful java is.  As long  as  Microsoft
"supports"  java,  their  old,  buggy,  incompatible  JVM will be the
"standard" on Windows, and few users will install a better one.

Others have pointed out that if you don't have java on  your  Windows
box,  lots  of  web  sites  that use it will bounce you to a download
site, where the install of an up-to-date  java  is  quite  slick  and
painless. So Microsoft's "support" can be considered the worst of all
available ways to get java on Windows.

More generally, one could argue that an OS  shouldn't  "support"  any
specific packages at all, at least not in the sense that MS uses this
term.  Support implies tie-ins and tools to prevent  the  competition
from being installed or working well. Much better would be an OS that
merely supplies the tools needed for software vendors  to  make  good
products that run on the OS.

Sorta like how unix was designed to work back in the 70's ...