Really? I thought i had seen a java logo on the alien fluz splash screen.
Moleboz sounds like a good idea, but it would be better if people were more educated into having the jre installed anyway, I read on a blog of the idea of a jre running a daemon on startup (multi tasking vm) and this seems like a god idea as long as it isnt to intrusive. (sun would probably make a “JAVA LOADING” splash on ur screen at startup tho…)
Couldn’t be bothered to change Flux. Spent far, far too long on that game.
The JRE does not need to be pre-installed by end users. It needs to be pre-installed by Microsoft. Or very small. Or have a more useful license.
Cas 
Well I couldn’t find any exact data, but based on the information here:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm
The projection for 2005 would indicate that 2005 is the year that broadband overtakes dial-up.
“At the national level, 36 percent of US online users accessed the Web through a high-speed connection in the fourth quarter of 2003”
My interpolation is admittedly crude. Taking the 26.2 million high-sped households from 2003 as 36% and multiplying by the appropriate factor to get the project 41 million households in 2005, I get 56% of the users having broadband in 2005. I had thought that I heard the 50% mark was passed already because of the lowering costs of broadband etc.
At any rate the trend is clear. The dial-up market is shrinking and the broadband market is growing. And it is reasonably safe to assume we are somewhere near the 50% mark now. So it makes sense NOW to target broadband users.
Not that I excuse Sun for not reacting fast enough to serve the dial-up users, but it is clear that even if they did nothing, that particular problem would eventually take care of itself. I think we are at that point. Sun is a bit late, sure it will be great to get the dial-up market as well, since they are still significant, but the majority of your customers are likely on broadband in North America.
I disagree with PrinceC’s strategy. By removing Java from any mention, and still using it internally I consider that stealing the JRE or the bits he likes. I do agree that Sun didn’t react fast enough with a legal solution, but I stop short of endorsing the moleboxing of the JRE simply because I think it is in clear violation of the license.
All Sun needed to do was to ADD a stipulation to the license that if you bundled a private JRE, stripped down or not, that you are required to display a “powered by Java technology” message and logo clearly on your product. That would start to put a much more positive spin on Java, particularly as a gaming platform. Now Cas’ has gone and done the opposite (removing mention of Java) and obviously that only hurts Sun’s efforts. Time to wake up, Sun!
I disagree with my strategy too, and I completely agree with your final summary about what to do, but it leaves Sun in the thornily difficult position of allowing some numpty to produce a PuppyGames Java VM and actually sell it without having given Sun a bean. I did ask Chris about licensing the VM but the price was going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars, and seeing as I’ve made a staggering total of $3000 out of Puppygames ever, that wasn’t going to happen.
Cas
Distributing a complete yet private to the application JRE still doesn’t require that you give Sun a bean, and you don’t even have to mention Java is used at all. So it’s hard to imagine what Sun’s hang-up is. They could be getting the Java brand some significant screen time if they tweaked the license.
Ok then, I’ll sell my cut-down VM, and call it Puppygames VM. The private launcher executable takes two parameters, one is a comma separated list of URLs, the other looks suspiciously like the name of a class that might implement public static void main(String[] args). It won’t be called Java, nor will it run Java code, officially. In fact most Java code will break because it’ll rely on AWT and other stuff I don’t supply. Think again about it.
Cas
Tthis is of topic but why is it called puppy games / shaven puppy, it really puts me off from even thinking about buying the games (which actually are not all that bad).
Sun’s “hang-up” has always been fear of platform fracture.
(Look at the mess in the J2ME space were we allowed that to happen if you want some idea why its a bad thing…)
Having said that, I did my best with the JGP JSR to try to cram a properly blessed reasonably minimal and game specific variation down management’s throats.
Woudl have worked too if anyone had cared enough to pony up the resources to build it. sigh
May yet come around to that again some day but Im not going to try myself again before I see signs that management will give it the necessary support.
Until that’s going to happen, swpalmer’s solution sounds like a good deal and very easy to accomplish.
[quote] to ADD a stipulation to the license that if you bundled a private JRE, stripped down or not, that you are required to display a “powered by Java technology” message and logo clearly on your product
[/quote]
Hey Jeff man, I’ve got that damned VM spec sitting here and it runs all my games 
Why don’t you wave Ultratron or Tribal Trouble under some top brass’ nose and see if they smell the coffee? You never know they might see the light. I’ve said that as a product you could flog my mini-VM for $100 each as a “boxed product” to game devs around the world and it’d be a nice little earner with bugger all impact on the rest of J2SE.
Cas
[/quote]
I’m totally cool with that except I still run some sort of vague risk of being hassled by lawyers. Not that they will get anything out of me, because I have nothing.
Cas
I’m not familiar with what is going on in J2ME, though I was under the impression that Sun was quite successful in that space.
In any case, my suggested pertained ONLY to private JREs that were not installed as a resource to be shared with the rest of the system. I.e. it would be forbidden to have The public Java Web Start launcher be aware of it. It woudl be forbidden for a double-clickable jar file to be launched with it. It would be forbidden for it to be the JRE used for Applets, at least those loaded from the internet in general. It would be for running aplications controlled entirely by the company that installed it.
It is already legal to install private JREs like that. JREs that never get used by anything other than one specific application, or perhaps multiple applications from the same vendor. Sun gets absolutely no credit for it in any way. No money, no brand awareness. Sun would be lucky if it was even mentioned in an obscure place like these message boards that the product in question used Java.
You would think that since the private JRE is not going to “contaminate” the system with a non-standard, incompatible JRE, that Sun could meet us half-way and adjust the license so that we give them some free advertising in exchange for the ability to only include the bits of the JRE that we need.
I don’t see how anyone looses in that case… Well actually if anyone looses it would probably be the game developer who now has to advertise that the game uses Java with the (unwarranted) stigma that comes with it. (“Oh, that’s just a Java game. I saw an applet back in 1996 and it sucked, I don’t want to play that!”)
If the game is any good at all, it’s going to be positive for Sun.
Im afraid your stripped down VM almost certainly wouldnt pass through the politics of the JSR process., sorry. Its a pretty delicate balancing act.
And without JCP blessing it can’t be called Java. And to be JCP blessed it needs a TCK, which really was the big hassle. I could’ve whipped out the plaform by myself with the clandestine help of a few other inetrested parties, but the TCK is like 10 times the work.
It seems that is where some lawyers have got there head stuck up their a–
Who cares what it’s called when the name will never see the light of day? That’s the situation we have NOW when we follow the current license to a T. Private JRE, hidden behind the scenes, with no value to Sun.
I say DON’T call the stripped down version (which I think should be ANYTHING that the developer wants to rip from a typical JRE, not some “blessed” distribution) a JRE. Make no claims that it is compatible with anything. Just require use of any files from the JRE to require the product to say “Powered by JavaTM technology a Sun Microsystems innovation” – or something equally fluffy that gives Sun and Java some screen time in a positive sense.
Scott speaks wisdom.
And also - why do you think the TCK is so difficult? Or the JCP? The VM I have is simply the 1.4.2 JRE minus classes. The TCK and specs are similarly easy to hack. Just delete anything that is not relevant. That’s quite easy to do as well - just run the tests and delete all the ones that fail 
Cas
[quote] just run the tests and delete all the ones that fail
[/quote]
LOL, that’s pure genius ;D
I’m totally with swpalmer here.
Nobody looses and everybody wins. There’s absolutely no chance of a fractured java if the license demands that a private JRE is only used privately.
The only thing Sun needs to do is change the license accordingly and make the distinction between ‘Java’ (with standard) and ‘powered by Java Technology’ (or something similar, pointing to private use of java technology).
Unfortunately as soon a licensing and lawyers become involved simple things become very expensive in terms of resources, time and money. Strange that isn’t it?
Kev
Bah. The size of the jre is only a problem for small indie games. The latest jre is 16MB download. Whats the problem of distributing a JRE inside your game dir ?
[quote=“zingbat,post:39,topic:24938”]
… most participating in this thread are the indies, writing small games.