"I would say to some of those industry titans that think you can build
technology in a closed room these days and promise that in some point in
future it will become open, [they are] are missing the boat," Baratz said.
"What will happen is that they will become overconfident and lose sight of
what's going on in the world around them," he added. "Losing site of that
can be disastrous."
..
"We're not going to let Sun get all the sales on this," said Pat Sueltz,
IBM's general manager of Java software.
"You don't have to go 100 percent all the way pure to get a benefit from
Java," said Ian Brackenbury, chief scientist at IBM's laboratories in
Hursley Park, England.
When asked if IBM's relationship with Sun was so strong that Big Blue
would turn down a lower licensing fee from Hewlett-Packard, which
announced Friday it had created its own embedded Java virtual machine,
Sueltz said, "No, we wouldn't."
..
Despite the harsh words from HP, Sun executives said HP's Java Virtual
Machine is a validation of the importance of Java to the computer
industry. Sun also said it believes HP is making a clone of Java,
compatible with Sun's specifications, and that Sun will compete with HP to
make sure its version of Java is better.
"Our copyrights say they can build a clone," said Jon Kannegaard, vice
president of software products at Sun. "I don't mind playing Intel if they
want to play AMD,"
"[HP] said they are building a clone," Kannegaard added. "If they are
building something that isn't a clone, that's stupid."
HP joined Microsoft, its strongest software ally, in objecting to Sun
submitting Java to the ISO, a status normally reserved for industry
consortia, not single companies.
"Hewlett-Packard would like to reiterate that we are unconvinced that a
single, for-profit company can serve as a reasonable [specification]
submitter," HP representative Karen Higginbottom wrote in comments
submitted in October. "All companies will rightly work toward their best
interest." That phrase may have foreshadowed HP's announcement today.