Gosling defended that fee Tuesday, saying, "You essentially have to get a service contract from us ," he said. "Because you're going to need help to run the compatibility tests."
He added that if a valid company or organization wants to redistribute Java and is short on cash and cannot afford the compatibility tests, Sun gives it to them for free, though some smaller J2EE vendors have disputed that claim.
"For everybody that's come to us and said we really want to do this but we can't afford the fee, we've actually just given it to them if they're not complete wackos," Gosling said. "When someone like Apple or IBM or someone comes and said give us this thing for free and by the way for free means we'll need a full-time engineer working for us for a year and that's part of the for-free thing, it's like, no, I don't think so."
Gosling said the community of Java developers values compatibility, which means most Java applications, when written once, can run on any operating system if the right JVM and Java runtime is installed. Even open-source supporters would rather see Java remain under Sun's stewardship than compromise the compatibility of the technology, he said.
"For us a big complicating factor is that when we survey the developer population, one of the things they care about hugely is that things remain interoperable--they can take their Java application, drop it down on a Java system and it just works," Gosling said.
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