Comments on: Sun's McNealy swings at rivals

The feisty CEO puts up his dukes in a speech that jabs at IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft and Congress.

[rdean]

I think it's jealousy...

IBM's got the open source credentials. McNealy's being disingenuous when he says that IBM should donate more of its intellectual property to the open source community. Sun's got some open source credentials, but they don't even act like a friend to the community. IBM at least treats the open source community like a partner and they're mature enough to compete with their competitors, rather than taking cheap shots at them.

[Considerate One]

Reality check

You don't have viruses in Java, right. You have "hostile applets" instead... Call malign-hostile-code-exploiting-Java-security-holes the way you want; they are still harmful to users. Worse, sometimes they are silent! And I guess Sun would like you to believe they don't exist. I'm sure the hackers appreciate this approach.
Quick literature, quite interesting:
http://www.cigital.com/hostile-applets/index.html
(Just be careful to not click in some of the examples they have there because they are every bit damaging as any other malign code)
And a nice extract from a 1997 (!!!) text about security for Java and Sun's attitude:
"The Java programming language has recently turned one year old. In its first year, Java has had a number of spectacular holes punched in its security model(...)and yet Sun Microsystems and its corporate partners have shown little progress in combatting hostile applets" (full text: http://www.cigital.com/hostile-applets/deviant1.html). I guess it pays off been such a pityful company that it can hide itself in the shadow of a bigger company like Microsoft that decided to be honest with consumers and talk openly about security problems. It kind of reminds me of Oracle "Unbreakable" campaign, that was ridiculously beaten by several holes found less than one month after its launch and still managed to stay afloat by not discussing the problems and pushing instead attention to Microsoft and its problems. It's about time we realized that ANY SOFTWARE HAS FLAWS and they are all exploitable by nature, and we all should be serious about that, talk about that and deal with that like grown ups. Kudos for Microsoft on this. Stop whining, McNealy!

Update your data!

Quoting articles from 1996? That's ancient history in tech terms.

The security holes are there, but certainly not unacknowledged or unaddressed. There are always new patches are alerts posted by Sun, and they will send you e-mails if you sign up to tell you proactively about any they find.

IBM loves open source? Hee, hee. More like AIX stinks, so they're abadnoning it. It's easy to throw your substantial weight behind something when it's free, and better than anything you've come up with in say - 30 years.

You need a reality check. Find me a more secure OS or programming language TODAY. Anywhere.