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Open source Java?
Bruce writes "Newsforge is reporting that Java 2 Standard Edition, may soon be set free of Sun Microsystems' notoriously complicated licensing. A group of 12 Apache developers have put together a proposal called Harmony. The proposal appeared as a simple project call last Friday on an Apache incubator mailing list. It would make this new, built-from-the-ground-up version of Java available under the Apache 2.0 free software license. And it's causing quite a stir in the Java community, especially since respected Sun frontmen Tim Bray, Simon Phipps, and Graham Hamilton have given the project their blessing. As yet there has been no reaction from Dr. Java, James Gosling himself, who is in Brazil talking to developers. In a FAQ on the Apache site, Harmony project leader Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: 'We believe that there is broad community interest in coming together to create and use an open source, compatible implementation of J2SE 5, the latest version of the Java 2 Standard Edition specification. While the Java Community Process has allowed open source implementations of JSRs for a few years now, Java 5 is the first of the J2SE specs that we are able to do due to licensing reasons.'"
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 5/07/1254211&tid=108&tid=8
I think this "quite a stir in the community" is wishfull thinking. The Java community at large doesn't care much about an open source Java. People want to or have to write code, not fighting holy OSS wars.
This is a home-made a storm in a teacup. There is already an initiative to create a free Java: GNU GJC. And no one cares about it. The Apache people are just running some propaganda now, but it will be forgotten in a few weeks.
Bringing open source Java runtimes to fruition should be an important step for open source java projects that are currently held back from entering distributions and packages because of this requirement. Also the requirement of Sun Java to use Java 5 on Linux (this situation may have changed..) would be a good thing to challenge.
Having such a fundamental and established organization like the Apache project behind the effort should really aid & help to posture this effort within the wider open-source community.
Business Voyeur
Well, can you run GPLed Java software on the Sun JVM?
Let's get real, folks. Critical thinking isn't that difficult.
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Sun employees have said many things about Java in the past: how open it is, how anybody can supposedly implement it, etc.
In reality, in 10 years, nobody has managed to create an interoperable, independent implementation of it. All the Java implementations that exist either are highly incompatible (gcj, kaffe, classpath, etc.), or they use Sun-licensed code (Blackdown, IBM, Apple, etc.). Something clearly makes it hard to re-implement Java, and that's probably both technical and legal. Whatever the specific reasons, it's a failure of Java as a general-purpose, standard programming language.
Whether Sun employees "bless" such a project or not doesn't matter: their opinion or public statements aren't legally binding. They know that it will take years until Harmony delivers anything, and Sun's legal team can still shut it down then.
What is interesting is that another project by this name got started during the QT is BAD days. Several developers started the "Harmony" project to replace the QT library with a GPL'd clone. Trolltech relicensing the library stopped this in it's tracks.
;-)
Odd how history DOES repeat itself
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Blackdown, Kaffe, GCJ, and quite a few similar "branches", all getting somewhere 60% down the way and stopping there. Somehow I don't quite believe the new project will get anywhere near "usable" as well.
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GPL and Apache licenses aren't quite compatible.
Since the GPL doesnt allow for distribution of code under any other license, then its not compatable with any other license. Other licenses are compatable with it, but its most certainly not a two way thing.Sometimes different ideologies foster competition, just as Firefox has forced MS to reopen development on IE 7, the GPL license forces people with more broader ideologies to create competitors to GPLed projects.
Harmony, thats an interesting name. Its the same name that was used when QT was going to be replaced. Hum is Harmony going to be the name of the closed source killers?
when this topic dies down. As a Java developer for the past 7 years, can someone remind me as to how Java will benefit from being open source? Sun along with the JCP has done an incredible job in advancing the platform. Java is the number one development environment for business applications. Bar none.
Why would someone encourage fragmentation and resource wasting ala KDE, Gnome and the gazzillions of Linux flavors is beyond me.
Sun, keep up the great stwerdess of the Java platform.
Perhaps a usable F/OSS Java implementation would quelch the OpenOffice.org 2.0 and Java issues...
Zonk, you are an embarassement, an icon of shame for this website.
/. archives before accepting news submissions.
You've been around long enough now. Time to start quickly checking
I hope you're really, really ashamed of the multiple editorial failures you're responsible for. Time to step up and do something about it, man ! No need to follow bad examples !
And I choose not to go AC to say that.
Why start from scratch? It this simply because the Apache folks don't like the GPL?
Actually it hasn't been decided if they will start from scratch yet. They might adopt an existing VM. They might adopt the GNU Classpath class library.
The discussions on checking up the inevitable licensing issues are already underway.
Scenario 1: You as an end user wouldn't have to. It would be included with your operating system, which is not currently the case. If you have to seek one out you would probably seek out Sun's, but if your Linux distro came with Apache's you would just use it unless it was unsuitable in some way.
Scenario 2: You develop Java apps. Right now you have to direct end users to another website (Sun's) and follow instructions found there to download and install Java. You could instead offer an install package that already includes Harmony.
Scenario 3: You want to use Java on an unsupported machine. Right now you don't really have many options for running Java apps on PocketPCs, for example (Like my Jornada 568). An Open Source JVM would almost certainly be ported a wide variety of platforms (considering how many platforms have reimplementations like Waba attempted for them the demand is obviously there).
The GPL is incompatible with the Apache licence, not visa-versa. And there's much more Java code under the Apache licence than under the GPL.
As a Java developer for the past 7 years, can someone remind me as to how Java will benefit from being open source?
By not giving excuses to rabid, open-source fundamentalist freaks to attack every worthwhile project that uses Java?
We don't just need a Open Source Java, we need a Open Source Java implementation fit for production use.
To produce such a thing, we need a community of competent people committed to that goal. This is what other Open Source Java projects lack.
To get such community going, one needs to communicate in a certain manner. This is what the Harmony people are now doing. The strenght of this project is, to me, that it has both excellent technical competence and competence in community management and in setting and achieving goals in a reliable manner.
This attempt is getting so much attention because senior people who understand that there is more to life than mere technical details pay attention when people who have a track record in producing results, speak.
And when they finally look at doing so, all I see people saying are things like "We already have GJC, you fuckers... we don't need you anymore".
I just don't get it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Since the GPL doesnt allow for distribution of code under any other license
Don't you mean re-distribution?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the GPL only covered re-distribution, and also could not prohibit authors from distributing under multiple licenses. Put simply, as the author of software, I choose the number and type of each license for every release of code.
What makes you think the people behind the current open source java projects are incompetent and not committed?
What an insulting thing to say.
evil is as evil does
Yeah, ask the main PR man for a competing product what he thinks of more competition. You're bound to get some unbiased answers.
.Net vs. Java, they are so close to identical it's not even funny. As to the implementation, neither GCJ, Kaffe or Mono is 'there' yet in terms of quality, at least not in my experience. If we just leave people to do their hacking, evolution will weed out the bad implementations and we'll have the best tools available.
Personally I don't see how anyone can care about
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
The GPL is the license the market has picked.
No, Apache is. Many many more companies run Linux as a free way to run Apache than use Apache only because the chose Linux.
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Right, because any idiot can clearly see that Harmony has nothing to gain from gcj or GNU Classpath.
From the PHBs' point of view, more maintainable code is more valueable than more efficent/faster developed code because it means they can treat the developers as interchangeable units they can add or remove on demand. Filling a Java opening is easy, filling a Lisp opening would be a nightmare.
If you need to write applications that run on platforms not supported by Java, er, how about not using Java? There are certainly many other solutions out there that are quite lovely. Sun's Java does a good job on the important platforms. How many people run PPC Linux? Not so many. I do, but not having the latest, greatest Java VM is hardly killing me. My point is that the problem is not so big that it warrants wasting all this time, especially since other people are already working on solving the problem. Compatibility is always going to be an issue with with the OS VM versus Sun's VM, so why not just do something entirely new altogether? You can't seriously think that Java is the best we can achieve. Beating Sun at their own game is impossible. Instead, let's create something new if it is really necessary, which I'm not convinced it is.