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Java3D Source Code Released
mrp101 writes "Over the past few months (aka year) the future of Java3D has been in question. Not too long ago Apple announced a port to Mac OS X, but still no official update from Sun. A few weeks ago Sun announced that they were going to release the source code and begin collecting comments for version 1.4/2.0. And today they delivered, right before the JavaOne conference. The announcement can be found here(1) and
the CVS here(2). The code includes the core scenegraph, the vector math library, and Sun's own add-on utility libraries."
> opensourcing Java will be the final step to
> make it a Standard...
Ugh!!! Why is it that people in the open-source
community can't seem to grasp the concept that
open-source is not necessarily equivalent to
open-standard. One has nothing to do with the
other. Closed source can ahdere to standards
just as well as open-source. This *isn't* a
tirade against open source; it's just that I'm
amazed at how often I seen this fallacy crop up
in open-source circles.
I'd like to think that under the hood Java3D uses whatever hardware accelerated 3D technology is available on the current system.
So whether Java is "just another 3D library" or an abstraction layer to truly make cross-platform development easier depends on the quality of the VM.
Java FP may run well on Sparc, but do you know anybody who owns a Sparc machine? I presume my university's got a few of them, but absolutely nobody I know uses them for their own machines. And that's the crux of the issue. It's fine to say that x86 is the inferior platform and all, but the fact of the matter is that it's the platform that the vast majority of end-users use.
So what you are saying is that the BSD licence is idealistic and the GPL is pragmatic but both tend towards the same goal?
By using those words you are already showing bias. You have decided that the GPL is necessary to get contributions and that's why you call it pragmatic. If you believe that you get plenty, if not more, useful contributions with the BSD license, you could call the BSD license pragmatic and the GPL idealistic.
If that's the only important difference then can we stop arguing over which one is better?
No, another important difference is that you can't use GPLed code without GPLing your entire app (you can't have one part BSD and another part GPL). That means that in some cases, the GPL will actually prevent people from doing the right thing (using open source code and giving back code). Those practical considerations make it so that non-GPL open source developers have a big reason to lobby against using the GPL. I think that the arguments would be much less if the GPL-advocates would ask for the LGPL instead of the GPL.