This week's book giveaway is in the Agile and other Processes forum. We're giving away four copies of The Mikado Method and have Ola Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund on-line! See this thread for details.
I found this article linked from digg.com (tech news site) and thought it could spur some interesting discussion so I thought I would post it. Personally I think that Java is already and important Linux language, if you are using Linux and OpenOffice then you are already using Java.
He asserts that now Java has been "liberated" by being open-sourced, it is free to blossom on Linux. Java's source status has never been an issue for me personally.
I'm afraid that the first thing I thought when I saw this article pop up was: "You mean it wasn't already?"
I've deployed Enterprise Java appservers on Linux for more than one employer over the years and I'd rather use Linux than Windows (whoops, another 5 critical security flaws today!)
Java and .Net are both ultimately languages that belong(ed) to a single vendor. The difference is that - based on experience - I would expect Microsoft to damage .Net in ways that could be harmful to Linux-based systems and I didn't expect Sun to do so. Moreover, the separation between language and OS is sufficiently wide in Java that third parties would have been capable of casting loose from Sun altogether. I don't feel that confidence in .Net.
Mostly, the open-sourcing of Java means that now third parties no longer have to make even that small amount of effort. And that for the ideological purists like Richard Stallman, Java is now as "free" as C/C++, FORTRAN, Perl, Python, etc. etc. etc. and is therefore now blessed to be used in unencumbered Linux environments.
In practical terms, I suppose that this means that distros like Fedora can now include Java in their base distros (unlike MP3 support, which is "free" but not "FREE"). For my purposes, I install the stuff after the fact anyway, so I don't expect to change much.
Customer surveys are for companies who didn't pay proper attention to begin with.
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