Another pea from the same pod. Even though Sun released StarOffice for free, and donated the source to Open Office, few in the Linux community are under the illusion that McNealy is an Open Source, GPL advocate. If he could find a way, he would grab a market lock in a millisecond. Something he has attempted to do with Java. He opened up the source to Java and let Open Source Blackstone Java group hammer on it for a few years. Then he took their code and released it as Java2, giving no credit to Blackstone, until community pressure forced him to. That one incident showed the Linux community what his intention were and blew away any and all karma he had garnered from SO and Java2. While the source given to the Open Office group was appreciated, they noticed that it was sans some of the most important technology - printer drivers and certain file formats. "The copyrights were held by others".


"Jini[tm] network technology provides a simple infrastructure for delivering services in a network and for creating spontaneous interaction between programs that use these services regardless of their hardware/software implementation."

It's been two years since Jini has been released and I've seen very little about it since then, but, I don't travel in Sun circles. Have you heard anything about it?

Comparing what Jini and Passport -Hailstorm offer with what McAfee has patented, it will be interesting to see what happens. I think McAfee is about to be squashed like a bug. MS has already rolled a firewall into XP, making BlackIce, and the rest, redundant. It wouldn't suprise me if anti-virus technology gets rolled into the XP as well. Good by McAfee and Symantec. Add that to raw TCP/IP socket access and you have the beginnings of a total disaster.