Open Source Irony – RedHat attacks Sun!!

As I was going through my news feeds, I came across this CNet’s News Story which reports that Michael Tiemann criticised Sun Microsystems, in a Blog post, stating that Sun’s decision to keep Java a proprietory software & not to open-source it is helping Microsoft & they have no reason to trust Sun. 😯

But Sun’s spokesman Noel Hartzell was quoted saying
[quote]It’s gratifying to know that Tiemann is a regular reader, but he’s just using his Web postings as a marketing vehicle to take theater to the next level.
Sun is more than happy to address specific concerns, but we’re not going play them out through the media. If people want to address them directly, let’s talk about them like civilized business folks.[/quote]

RedHat has risen as a major company which has produced only Open Source software but its not that Sun hasn’t contributed to Open Source. Sun released their StarOffice(a strong competitor to MS Office) as Open Office & also plan to make its Solaris OS as open-source software by this year end, but is keeping Java as a proprietory software, which is what has become a prick in the neck of one Mr. Michael Tiemann who happens to be Red Hat’s vice president of open-source affairs. 🙄

Well, for starters, I don’t think there’s any problem in having Java as a proprietory software. And its not just me, this debate has been around for quite sometime now & most of the Java developers that I know(there are quite a few whom I know) don’t think that Java not being open-source is any reason to moan about. 😀

And to take a shot back at Mr. Michael Tiemann, the RedHat blogs use MovableType as their blog engine which is as open-source as Microsoft’s Windows. 🙄 And all this talk about supporting open-source. If they really give a damn about open-source, they’d have used any one of the many open-source blog engines like WordPress or b2evolution or NucleusCMS or Blog:CMS, etc. 👿

I think that Sun’s spokesman is right, Mr. Michael Tiemann is using all this just as a marketing gimmick, err, I mean marketing vehicle. 🙄