de tomKronieken

Ted Neward is writing about WORA. Especially the last paragraph is interesting:

Remember how long it took us to get Sun to do a Linux port? They never really wrote the port, either--they just swiped the Blackdown port and forwarded it as their own. Sun has long only been interested in Java for two platforms: Solaris (by choice) and Win32 (by necessity). Let me also take this moment to redirect readers to John Lam's article questioning where WORA leaves Sun in terms of a business strategy; in many respects, WORA doesn't make sense for a company that makes the majority of their revenue from hardware, and this is a point that Sun has never explained the rationale behind. Given this kind of fogginess, why do you expect Microsoft to follow a similar strategy? Where's the money in WORA for the platform implementor?

Food for thought. What's Sun's hidden agenda for promoting WORA? (and why weren't they consistent in it?) If you were Bill today, would you port .NET to other platforms? (No, honest. You're in his chair. You have a mortgage to pay on a 2500-acre house. You want to buy the misses a nice island or so for her birthday.)

What I appreciate in the Softies community, is that at least they admit that MS is in the game for the money. Be sure that Sun is too, but they don't advertise it that much (and some Java people seem to think they're some sort of charity, too).