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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

Sounds more like Java to me. Let's replace a few words in the article:

"Under the hood, Java Applets work by compiling Java source code to an intermediate representation, rather than architecture-specific representations as in Native Client. The Java bytecode is wrapped into a portable jar file, which can be hosted on a web server like any other website asset. When the site is accessed, Chrome fetches and translates the portable executable into an architecture-specific machine code optimized directly for the underlying device. This translation approach means developers don’t need to recompile their applications multiple times to run across x86, ARM or MIPS devices."

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> Sounds more like Java to me. Let's replace a few words in the article:

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

After seeing all the web developers of the 90s dump on Java applets all the time, it's fascinating to see the same functionality being reimplemented piecemeal in Javascript.

PNaCl isn't Javascript.

We dumped on Java applets because they ran isolated in rectangles on the window and took ages to start and then proceeded to slow our machines to a crawl, and most of what it was used for was mundane stuff that could be done without Java, or that we didn't want.

The ultimate indictment of just how bad a fit java applets was is exactly that people shunned it despite the horrible alternatives.

It is a "Java" that Google controls, that is the main point.

It is not open source, then?

And Java is controlled by whom?

It is not open source, then?

It's open source, but all committers are Googlers and/or have to sign a copyright assignment. It's controlled by Google (which isn't a bad thing necessarily).

And Java is controlled by whom?

Oracle. They own the Java trademark, so any fork cannot be called Java unless they certify it.

> It's open source, but all committers are Googlers and/or have to sign a copyright assignment. It's controlled by Google (which isn't a bad thing necessarily).

Very importantly it's a copyright (and patent) license, not assignment. And it's the same thing required for any contribution to Chromium[1], and just about every competently run open source project out there, so it's not really an interesting distinction. The important aspect is more that the only "spec" for PNaCl is the documentation, which means that it can be changed by them...but then you break everyone's already compiled apps, so there are some incentives against that. Regardless, it's still open source, and you can still fork it, etc.

[1] http://dev.chromium.org/developers/contributing-code#TOC-Com...

I agree 100% that proper handling of copyright is important (and yes, I was wrong about the license/assignment thing), and I think Google is doing the right thing here.

My point was that Google controls the project (so far as it is possible to control an open source project). I don't see that as a bad thing.

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