Monthly Archives: July 2003

buzzword compliance, General Chaos

A new grind

Over on Sun's Java.net “weblogs” (talk about embracing and extending), Richard Gabriel talks about a recent visit to Sun by Larry Lessig and the “three bears” of intellectual property as they relate to Java…or as Gabriel refers to it, “a fictional…language called *a*a.”

Lessig suggested that the laws of intellectual property would force “*a*a” to one of two extremes–either open source, where its reach could be greatly expanded but the risk of it being “hijacked” or “embraced and extended” [Gabriel's links, not mine :-)]; or being kept under the control of Sun (whoops, *u*), and thus maximizing its integrity but limiting its potential reach. The third route, or the “just right” that Lessig (and Gabriel, by proxy) endorsed was one where the language was handed over to a “conservancy”, a la The Creative Commons licensing approach–much like what Dave Winer just did with RSS 2.0.

I suspect that Sun will have to take Lessig's advice, or be forced to take Java open-source via some other licensing scheme soon. And I've spoken with enough people who've got some insight to the workings of Sun to be confident that they're certainly already pointed in that direction. Certainly, they've been embracing open source for a while.

The main question is whether they go with a “traditional” open source license or the Creative Commons approach–turning, say, the Java Community Process into , say, an independent, jointly-held (with the other Java contributors) intellectual property holding corporation , something I said they should do nearly 4 years ago when I was at Java Pro. (Unfortunately, that opinion is hidden behind a pay-to-read firewall at DevX.)

Unless they do, Java's not going anywhere. Many of the major contributors to the Java code base are reluctant to cough up more of their hard work to add to Sun's bottom line; for Java to explode into the mobile market and other spaces where Sun has no current clout, it really needs happy (and unfettered) partners to make it happen. Microsoft is already moving in a crushing fashion into the wireless market, making some sort of Java “glasnost” an even more urgent requirement.

But then there's that damn lawsuit…and there's the

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General Chaos

Lesspectations

Consumer Confidence Suffers Surprise Drop. Consumers, nervous about rising unemployment, lost confidence in their economic prospects in July, resulting in a sharp, unexpected drop in sentiment. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: Business]

Well, duh.

Why this was “unexpected” is beyond me. Here, we've had the economy running on purely consumer spending and house buying for the past, well, year, and business spending is still flat. Despite the bullshit unemployment figures that we're hearing, a lot of people remain out of work, and many have lost unemployment benefits (removing them from the unemployment rolls, conveniently). An unmeasured number of people are underemployed, earning a fraction of what they once did, with no prospects for short-term improvement. Stand by for a big seasonal layoff at the end of the summer, and watch as deflation and Wal-Martization of the market drives more small businesses to the edge of bankruptcy.

Post-war euphoria is being replaced by post-post-war realization that we'll be slogging around in Iraq for the long term, and those checks that many people just got in the mail from George (see “You may already be a winner”) are going straight into people's rainy day funds–or are being used to offload existing credit card debt.

It's late afternoon in America, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan. We don't have expectations–we have “lesspectations”. The economy, despite all the cheerleading from the Fed and the stock market, is turning around with all the nimbleness of a supertanker, instead of the cigarette boat we all were hoping for.

You can't water ski behind a supertanker too well.

Thanks to the huge debt being run up by the war in Iraq, the government is flooding the bond market with Treasury junk–driving down bond prices and driving mortgage companies out of their minds.

And consumer confidence is down? Pshaw.

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