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FSF, OpenOffice.org Team Reach Agreement on Java
Bruce Byfield points out his NewsForge (part of OSTG) article about something good coming out of the conflict over Java in OpenOffice.org. It begins "A dispute between the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and OpenOffice.org (OOo) over the increased use of Java in the upcoming version 2.0 release of OOo is over
-- at least for now. The two groups have found a short-term solution, and are working together on
ways to keep the dispute from happening again." The story provides a decent background on why it matters, and shows a surprisingly conciliatory attitude on both sides.
Remember the bad old days when the brand-new language "C" was owned by Bell Labs, and they claimed anything you wrote in C belonged to Bell?
Remember how long that was true? As measured in picoseconds?
There are no closed source languages. That's an urban legend. You can try to booby-trap a language, like MS tried to do to Java, but that won't work, either. You may recollect that MS failed in that effort, expensively(!).
It's almost impossible to encumber open source software by using proprietary tools. That's a self-serving tale told by the proprietary vendors, and false.
davecb@spamcop.net
He was given a free licence, which was then revoked, as was allowed by the terms of the licence. How is that like Java?
The concern was that OO.o was using proprietary extensions to Java which aren't well documented and are exclusive to Sun.
That being the case, Sun going belly-up isn't the issue. Sun going all SCO and announcing that from now on anything using their version of Java will have to pay $699 for a license is.
The problem isn't the language, it's the libraries. Java, .NET, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc have complex standard libraries. This is expecially true for Java, which includes far more of the GUI system and other OS-specific features as part of the standard library.
In essense, Java == C++ plus the C++ standard library plus Win32. It's simple to code portable C++ if you use only the C++ standard libraries, but the moment you start using Win32, you have a portability problem. Until something like WINElib makes the Win32 layer portable, any exclusive use of Win32 in a C++ project locks out Linux and other free OSes.
That's the problem. GNU/CLASSPATH has made outstanding progress lately, but it hasn't yet reimplemented all the Java libraries. It'll take some time before it does. Until then, using functions/classes that are not implemented in GNU/CLASSPATH will be a problem for any open source software.
The FSF was being irrational. There was a JVM licensed with an FSF license which wasn't compatible with the latest Java standards. Instead of advocating fixing the broken code, Stallman was apparently advocating not using anything which didnt work with the broken code, to the point of forking a major project to avoid fixing that broken code. That's hardly an example of good programming ethics. Fix the bugs, don't complain about others not working around them.