Q&A: Raymond Expounds on Open Letter to Sun, McNealy

Heh! Right. The response I got was, first, Simon Phipps came out with some remarks that were perhaps not as well-considered as they should have been. He claims he was misquoted in a distorting way by a reporter, and maybe thats true …

Well, if its the incident I think youre referring to, I am that reporter and I can assure you he was not misquoted. We have a transcript of his keynote and he said everything I reported, just the way I reported it.

Editors note: Simon Phipps contacted eWEEK after this interview appeared and said the misquote was not the responsibility of Darryl Taft nor of eWEEK and was instead attributable to another reporter and publication.

Ah, well, he came out with his remarks; I came back and took his head off in my second letter. But the next thing that happened after that is I was contacted by a high muck-a-muck at Sun who basically said, "Lets talk." And weve had a couple of phone conversations and he has made it clear that he is speaking to me with the concurrence of the people he reports to, and we are having constructive discussions about what Suns going to do next.

Really? In the open-source world?

Yes.

Whats your take on what theyve done to date?

I think theyve been—as I said in my original letter—theyve been inconsistent. Theyve done things that were very good, like supporting OpenOffice. And theyve done things that, from where I sit, look just dumb, like not open-sourcing Java.

Next page: Details on the dumbness of not open-sourcing Java.