They f***ed all those people for nearly a decade that tried to cooperate with them to get Java running on different platforms than Windows. If you followed the history of Blackdown Java 2 you know how stingy Sun has always been to answer technical questions that these guys asked again and again without getting a sufficient answer. Blackdown tried hard to cooperate with Sun to bring Java to Linux but their stack was never a vital alternative to using the original distribution downloadable by Sun for free (as in free beer). And programmers that first of all want to get their own problems solved don't care as you simply risk to get fired for using non-standard tools if things go belly up due to incompatibilities between different Java engines. For a long long time there was a pressure to get a free Java implementation. Just count the lines of code other people where willing to write just to get around using Sun's Java. Good code, that will probably never flow back into an open sourced Java.

Yes, Java and all its APIs still runs best on Windows, Microsoft not being a particular friend of Sun and vice versa as you know. Nevertheless, Sun developed Java for Windows first as this is the biggest market. They always had to catch up with the underlying operating system and its moving APIs trying to lock out competitors. That surely was not cheap.

One of Java's key selling point has always been platform independence: ``write once -- run everywhere''. So far the theory but things are always different in real life. Trolltech had a nice twist on that meme rephrasing it ``with write once -- compile everywhere''. The differences between both approaches to platform independence are compelling. Java plain fails to run on multiple platforms for technical reasons or just because Sun did not deliver the equivalent software stack for other platforms than Windows; Java is slow as its byte code is still to be interpreted by a virtual engine even though you need a separate compile step. Qt, Trolltech's key product, on the other hand, is simply yet another library you link your programs against the result of which is a highly optimized executable. And you can do so on whatever platform you decide to support. Plus the code is more efficient. I could go on comparing Java's APIs with Qt for quite some time where Qt wins hands down, e.g. library design. But let's stop here.

In some respects Java on servers has to be judged differently than in browsers or on the desktop. Let me make it short: it is OK on servers but sucks everywhere else. Applets are dead. Swing sucks. It is too complicated. It looks bad. It is ugly, out of the box. It does not integrate with the rest of your desktop. If it does then it only integrates with a Windows desktop. Fonts are a nightmare. Themability and skinnability of its widgets is voodoo -- at least to me.

Next point: who is interested not only going to looking at the masses of source code but also understand and fix it? The anonymous Open Source masses? This project is much too large now to. It was locked away for too long. Things are fine if a community is given a chance to mature and grow as the software does it is grouped around. This is obviously not the case for Java. Just have a look at Open Office or Firefox. These projects have big big problems to get more coders involved, people that not only work around symptoms but understand and fix the underlying issues besides envision sensible enhancements. How many coders work on Firefox? Who is currently investigating buggy printing? How long does that bug persist? Is this issue being a key feature for browsers really 7 years, 11 months, 3 weeks, 5 days, 9 hours old with a long thread of comments circling around it. To be fair, we all have such bugs buried in you bug tracker too. But hey printing is so essential ... gosh.

One comment from a guy called Wells dating back to 2006-10-13 reads like this: While I wish I had the skills necessary to fix a bug like this I don't, but I have hung around now a year and a half to see what would happen and I find this bug an excellent case study in the Cathedral and Bazaar model of software development. It seems to defy traditional claims that the bazaar model is a superior development model when it comes to fixing top100 rated bugs. The wider community has not hunkered down and come up with a fix to this critical printing problem. Now the bug fix is slated for Firefox 3, if we should be so lucky. Keep up the good work! Not quite encouraging, eh? Don't forget that this browser has its own knotty history and this particular bug may be a good indicator of what the situation currently is for the Firefox project. As I trust in history I expect things to be even worse for Java. The community already moved on to different techniques. Will it come back to Java? Let's place a bet on ``no''.

Lots of these things keep being repeated all the time like bad mantras. So maybe they are no myths, maybe you just made it up yourself being a victim of SelfFUDDing. Definitely, TWiki -- as every other software -- has its dirty corners. The important point to remember is that while you can overcome most of the technical issues you cannot gain back as easily the lost reputation once everybody internalized a certain amount of FUD. Get me right, I don't want to conceal deficiencies. But the TWikiCommunity has to stop shouting at each other and be more productive.

The fact is that the TWikiMyths are already out there. Let's take it with a bit of salt ... and leave the kitchen clean (mov).

Thanks goes to Vintage Paperbacks & Digests, all those marvelous artists and ``The Normals'' for their crazy song. Hope you don't mind I took some of those covers and mocked them up.

As wikis don't force any structure on how you write and organize your content things have to ``evolve'' somehow. But that does not come without an amount of friction as you only fix something if it is disturbing you and the more often you have to fix someone else's pages the higher your personal barrier gets to do so. This inevitably leads to a spiral of death and this wiki instance will die. So the effect of people writing quite bad pages in the beginning and don't learn how to do better might propagate and have long-lasting effects on the community. That in itself is nothing new but the ease you create bad content, stale content, lose content and the rising threshold to compensate and/or tolerate this makes it quite a danger to wikis ending abandoned. And we see abandoned and spammed wikis a lot. Go google youself.

The only way to grant a certain minimum of standard quality to content is to press your users into structures that they must obey to. And this is certainly quite non-wiki.

Example: at our department (NatS) researchers must prepair one talk per year at least to introduce the others about the scope of their ongoing work. That's called ``Oberseminar'' at german universities A NiceThing(tm). So people get a page on the wiki where they are told to put an abstract about their talk. Effect: they all do it differently, which is ok unless some minimal standards are fulfilled (e.g. giving information where and when the talk will take place, who is talking, funding, linking back to the time table, and so on). This is all pretty obvious stuff, right?. No, it isn't, even for trained professionals, sadly.

The only way out, as I said, is adding a corset -- TWikiForms, where they fill in their data. But, alas, I resist to go and make such a fart a more or less complicated TWikiApplication. Sigh.

After a couple of years that I last tried VMware I just checked back their homepage to survey their current products. Before anything else, hats off to the developers of this masterly piece of software! And they even offer pre-packaged images that can be run with their free (as in free beer) VMware Player. One of those caught my eye: the ``Browser Appliance''.

From their description:

The Browser Appliance is a free virtual machine that allows users to securely browse the Internet using Mozilla Firefox. Run the Browser Appliance with VMware Player to:

• Protect Against Adware and Spyware: Users protect their PCs against adware, spyware and other malware while browsing the Internet with Firefox in a virtual machine. The Browser Appliance leverages virtual machine isolation capabilities to prevent malware downloaded in the browser from propagating to the normal desktop.
• Safeguard Personal Information: The Browser Appliance can be configured to automatically reset itself after each use so personal information is never stored permanently.

``Hm ... '', you hear me mumble. I am very much aware of the need for software security -- especially when it is inherently exposed to the wild in such a way as browsers are. Browsers of all kinds have a long trail of security patches that need to be brought to the front as fast as possible. Using virtual machines to study attack vectors is quite common. Using virtual machines for browsers right away might be good idea, it seems. But offering a virtual engine containing Firefox doesn't do Mozilla a favor as you might get the impression that it rather needs the extra jail to be safe -- which is IMHO not true. Contrast that with a virtual engine pre-packaged with IE6. That makes more sense. Rolling back any malware that sneaked in using the VMware specific means is exactly the thing you would need -- given you need IE. No, Mozilla Firefox does not need the virtualization. It is safe without already. He, the next critical patch to it will prove me wrong.

``Unintentional'' FUD might arise beyond other factors from ``bad behavior'' not following the Netiquette Guidelines (RFC1855). It is generated in the heads of people - being possible customers - that are not involved directly in the FUDDy communication but are able to follow it. Open discussions as they happen in FOSSland are good as they make the things transparent to everyone: for the project contributors but also for non-contributors, guys that are simply interested to see what's going on. Let's call it ``SelfFUDDing'' whose effect is still the same: deterrence. This is fatal when contributions to a project are free and open as people simply go away if their altruism is overruled by the pain of standing it. Needless pain, even more so if it stems from SelfFUDDing. As Linus writes in his Linux kernel management style (funny reading)

1. don't call people d*ckheads (at least not in public)
2. learn how to apologize when you forgot rule (1)

Even keep in mind not to call people d*ckheads even if you are right (any suggestions what the asterisk is). Not only be creative in terms of coding but also in terms of communication: BUT don't forget to code because code rulez in the end! What is your CODE/TALK-RATIO for today and are you happy with it? People start listening to your TALK if your CODE is good. Needless to say that communication is important especially for the FOSSy way of decentralized development, the very bottleneck of which is how good project members are able to communicate efficiently & reducing the amount of unintentional SelfFUDDing to a minimum that can be withstood. So I am not asking to calm all waves as life should stay salted. But be carefull with what you say, man. FUD happens if you simply don't get the facts right and still tend to follow honorable principles. Having some kind of principles in the back of your mind is important as they feed your coding instincts. Failing to project some toplofty principles on the right case by not getting the facts right is a culprit that comes back then. Be prepaired to admit that you were wrong. If you fail to excuse you lose even more credit and nobody will listen to you anymore, only those that have no access to your FOSS credit account: most important customers. Ergo you end up SelfFUDDed all over the face and harming everybody else in the boat not floating.

Btw. TWikiFUD is an instance of SelfFUD commonly seen these days (/me angry).