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Sun Agrees to Talk to IBM over Open Sourcing Java

Posted by michael on from the but-can-they-walk-the-walk dept.

comforteagle writes "Sun has agreed to meet with IBM to further discuss the issue of open sourcing Java with them. 'Sun is closely evaluating the effectiveness of the process.' Could Sun be coming around to actually doing this?"

5 of 451 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Um. An? by Wateshay · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, the best Java IDE is already free (in all senses).

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    "If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."

  2. Re:NOT free enough by Joseph+Lam · · Score: 5, Informative

    Slackware 9.1 comes pre-installed with Sun's JDK 1.4....is it in violation or what?

  3. Re:Not very important for me by Arker · · Score: 5, Informative

    Both BSD and GPL offer the possibility to fork and create your own branch! Why would the license be an issue for this problem?

    Because the BSD license allows you to keep your fork secret, that's why. This allows someone like MS to come along and make a fork that puts the original at a disadvantage, and keep their changes secret (and/or patented) and effectively bar all the Free versions from being compatible. However, under the GPL they would have to publish their source, allowing the Free versions to quickly and relatively easily adapt to any such changes.

    --
    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
  4. Re:NOT free enough by pyros · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sections i and ii of the license clause you quote state that you can't distribute the jre/jsdk without an aditional product. So companies who care about such legal issues, like Red Hat, have to write some java app and distribute that, and have the jre/jsdk be included in that package. They would have to make it a part of every package which depended on it. I suppose they could keep two versions of each package which needs it, and the first package would get the fat version. In turn subsequent packages would see that it is installed and get the thin version instead.

    But they can't distribute the jre/jsdk by itself.

  5. IBM virtual machines by roca · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work at IBM. I've been authorized to say the following to clear up a few misconceptions:

    IBM has 3 systems that can execute Java programs:
    - The oldest JVM is the base for the current generation of products and is derived from Sun code, but contains significant changes to the JIT and garbage collector. See
    https://www6.software.ibm.com/dl/lxdk/lxdk-p
    - A newer product JVM (internally called J9) was developed from an IBM code base. See http://www.ibm.com/software/wireless/wme/features. html
    - A third (Jikes RVM) has been developed principally for research use and is written in Java. It is an existing open source project that uses GNU Classpath libraries and is popular with JVM researchers. It is not complete, mostly because Classpath is not complete. It is capable, with only the Classpath libraries, of running substantial programs such as Eclipse. See http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/jikesrvm/