Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 07:19:43 -0500
To: "Elizabeth O. Coolbaugh" <cool@eklektix.com>
From: "Kevin B. Hendricks" <khendricks@ivey.uwo.ca>
Subject: Re: JDK conflagration

Hi Liz,

>I think what most of the people in the Linux community care most about
>is *your* opinion of the situation and the opinion of the other
>members of the Blackdown team.  I can pull many of your statements
>from disparate sources to try to put together a coherent image, but
>I'd very much like to invite you to send me any official or unofficial
>statement about the situation which you would like linked into this
>story.  I've been reported on your work for a long time and I'd like
>to do what I can to support you through this situation.

Sorry to respond so late but I just received this.  It is probably too late
but I wanted to pass along some info.

I have resigned from the Java-Linux porting effort.  In my "real life", I
am a tenured business school prof.   The only reasons I was involved in the
JDK project at all were to learn something, to give back to Linux community
something for all of the benefit I have received, and for fun.

Well it just stopped being fun and there are other ways to give back to the
community so on other projects.

The funny thing is I am happy Sun is officially supporting Linux,  I am
unhappy about how they went about doing that.

Here are the facts:

- Sun used the Blackdown JDK 1.2.1 source tree and gave it to Imprise which
was completely in their right to do under the license agreement we all
signed.

- Sun never told us of this separate effort, never contributed any bug
fixes they (Sun/Imprise) found back to us

- When Sun / Imprise made the announcement they did not credit Blackdown in
any way and their PR / press releases and things made it sound like the
Blackdown effort was basically worthless (just read the PR from Imprise /
Sun)

- Imprise constantly referred to our 4 years of work on porting the JDK to
Linux as "Blackdown's early efforts" (see the java-linux mailing list
archive) which just made matters worse.

This is simply not fun.  I have been a programmer for over 20 years (my
first project was loading paper tapes on a PDP-11 in the electrical
engineering labs at Cornell University and most of my first real
programming projects were done on punch cards) and the cardinal rules that
we always lived by were that you *ALWAYS* give credit when credit is due,
and you *NEVER* belittle the work of others that came before you.  I guess
that just not the case anymore.

Needless to say many of the Blackdown developers were/are not happy.  I
tried to get straight answers from Sun but got no reply until yesterday
when Richard Schultz of Sun called me on the phone.

He apologized for what happened.  I told him I had resigned and that I
would not reconsider.   He asked me what he could do to fix things with
Blackdown.  Here is the advice I gave him:


    1. give credit to Blackdown immediately on both Sun's and Imprises
    webpages and say that Blackdown *will* be involved in future
    efforts and give a link to the www.Blackdown.org site so that
    Karl's site continues to be an "official" site for Java-Linux

    2. Merge the damn trees together asap and get everyone working
    together to improve a single CVS tree (and not waste time with
    duplicative efforts).

    3. Call both Karl and Juergen and formally apologize to both of you
    for what happened.

    4. Open the process to get more bug fixes and things moving back
    and forth between Sun, Imprise, Blackdown (cross-over the two
    mailing lists if need be).

I also asked him to please support the *other* Linux platforms that
Blackdown supported includeding PowerPC (my platform), Sparc, M68k, Arm,
and Alpha.  Currently the Blackdown RC3 will build out of the box on
PowerPC, and Sparc and might on M68K too.  He said he did not think that
would happen )although Sparc might eventually get supported).

I have no idea if he will take any of my adivice and I can not speak for
the other Blackdown porters who might like to see other changes going as
well (the Sun / Blackdown process has been very 1-sided at best for a very
long time with all of the work and effort coming from the Blackdown side
:-(

I have seen a formal apology show up on Computerworld but I have no idea
whether any of the other changes have happened (I stopped looking at
Imprise / Sun websites and PR yesterday).

If there is any pressure the Linux community can bring to help Sun do the
remaining items on my list (including supporting other Linux platforms), I
would love to see that happen.

Sorry to be so long-winded.

I hope this provides you with some info.

Take care,

Kevin