After this week's settlement with Microsoft, Sun has come under attack by some in the computing community about their willingness to "sleep with the enemy."

Sun's venerable "java guy" has posted a blog entry wherein he gives his take on why the Java world should not fear the $1.6B settlement between the two companies.

Embedded in the blog is the following paragraph that I think is one of the better rants about Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation).

As for Richard Stallman's Free but shackled: The Java trap , it's hard to know where to begin. He has his own rather peculiar definition of "Free" that I think violates the First Law of Thermodynamics (energy is conserved): developers put a huge amount of energy into creating software and if they can't get that energy back in a way that balances, then the system falls apart. I've been in this discussion countless times and I'd like to avoid landing there again. GPL software is not "free": it comes with a license that has a strong political agenda. Like GPL software, the Java platform is "free" in many senses: you don't have to pay anything for the runtime or developers kit and you can get the sources for everything.