SAP's Passionate Blog Post

Filed in archive Business on November 15, 2009

© MSVG

SAP CTO Vishal Sikka has published a histrionic blog post criticizing Sun Microsystems for its control over Java.

"The company's chief technology officer slammed the Java Community Process (JCP) for being 'heavily dominated' by Sun to the detriment of everybody else," writes The Register's Gavin Clarke. "Vishal Sikka said Oracle -- preparing to buy Sun -- now has a 'unique opportunity' to turn the JCP in to an independent body... Sikka has also called on Oracle to open source the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and put it under an independent board with a license that's friendly to closed-source companies like SAP."

As JavaWorld's Josh Fruhlinger notes, the blog post starts off reasonably enough. "But then his next quote is from Mikhail Gorbachev," he writes. "Because he finishes up the blog post memorializing the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, and claims that in making his triumphant call for Java liberty, he is the moral equivalent of Ronald Reagan demanding that Gorbachev tear down the Wall. This is, to put it mildly, overstating things. Still, it's nice to know that Java can elicit such passion, you know?"

More here from InformationWeek ... and more here from Computerworld.