Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Out of curiosity, do you know why Sun leaves it up to Apple to distribute their JRE/JDK, rather than just putting an installer at java.sun.com like they do for Windows/Linux/etc?

Sun created the original 1.0 JDK for the Mac, and it sucked big time. Probably because the people they had working on it were not really Mac programmers - they were Solaris people who had learned enough to get the command line tools working on a platform without a default command line.

Things improved once Apple took it over, and improved more (IMO) once they had a Unix-like OS underneath, as the JDKs were then similar.

I expect Sun could bring it back into the fold, but they do not want to spend the money. I am not sure I blame them - Apple is likely better at figuring out how to integrate the very different models than Sun is.

I do wish that Sun would again do what they did some years back - have a few employees working at Apple to act as a data conduit between the two companies. It often feels like Not Invented Here is the Sun corporate motto. There are exceptions, though, like the shared archive in 1.5 - developed first on the Mac 1.4 JDK, then moved to every JDK in 1.5

Scott