EDIT: I’m doing a slight thread-jack here, and ignoring the JRE licensing issues just to look at the issues I’m highlighting in this post. I realised it could look quite confusing without this explanation
Because the value of letting all your partners (i.e. people trying to develop games in java) know what’s happening outweighs the probably tiny advantages you give to competitors. AFAICS this is the fundamental equation that justifies Sun supporting java games developers publically instead of behind closed doors.
As a matter of interest, I would love to know what competitors you feel are going to benefit by any non-trivial amount to know roadmaps etc for Sun’s involvement in java games development. I personally can’t think of any examples right now?
You cannot support java games development with that attitude; this is probably why people like myself feel you are not managing to properly support the community and that you are damaging the community - this attitude would certainly prevent you from doing these things.
In answer to your specific examples, what most good marketing companies (like MS) do is to tell specialists and partners in advance roughly what will be announced - and this is usually done in public, but because they don’t send a press release to the news sites etc non-specialists don’t notice.
Then, at the event, you still get your big exciting moment - but you have the benefit that you haven’t caught your partners by surprise, and that when the news people etc go looking for commentary by specialists, they get some good responses because these people have had time to think about it and worked out how great it really is. (PS if you’re running a community like JGO it’s usually a good idea to in fact hand out lots of “quick reference/FAQ” material before the event that doesn’t give much away but contains brief explanations of where the new thing will add value - so that when they’re contacted by press etc, or write editorials in magazines etc, they don’t misinterpret your message).
Just to be clear, what you might expect someone to reveal “roughly” would be a lot more than the GTG usually does - and a lot earlier. For instance, last year you told us not to start a Wiki and various other activities but said you couldn’t tell us why. What you should have done (now that I know what you were keeping secret!) was to say “We will very soon have a lot of extra community features, a special site, dedicated resources within Sun that include lots of community involvement things that let you work together and share info, code, and project planning. The precise nature of all this will be announced during March”. Instead you said nothing, and only belatedly responded to the Wiki attempts by saying please don’t do it it will be wasted effort. You told us after we’d wasted the time thinking about it and starting it etc; you could so easily have told us weeks before.