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Java: One Step Closer To Open Source
Ritalin16 writes "Sun Microsystems on Monday intends to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its Java programming language by sharing the proprietary source code for several key Java applications used by corporate customers. Sun officials believe that by making the source codes open to developers, they will spur more involvement and use of Java-based applications."
This doesn't really matter to Java detractors. IT types, usually not programmers, will bring up the same old tired clichés.
Somewhere around the year 2000 Java became uncool especially with younger programmers. I guess because it became an institution taught in high schools everywhere. Maybe programmers feel Java is rammed down their throats so they champion less established languages even something by Microsoft.
Java really is the best thing out there for a lot of things. Sun can give away everything and detractors will be like: "OK but what about your first born child?"
Sun will not go completely open-source. They already have JBoss, which is open-source... too bad that no one I know of uses it. Also, I doubt anyone would have used Platform Edition 9...unless they made it Open Source and promoted the hell out of it, which is why they are doing this. Everything will remain closed-source. *shrugs* just my 2 cents, though.
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Of course any discussion of Java isn't complete without someone bringing up that it's slow and bloated. I don't mind the speed, because I don't use any java applications that need to be all that fast. IANA programmer, but java seems to have a horrible leak in it. I have to shut down my freenet node and restart it about once per day because javaw.exe slowly nibbles away at the available memory and will routinely eat up 99% of the CPU usage. The highest the memory usage has gotten before I restarted is ~ 181MB. Over 10% of my total memory!
Free MacMini
Get the wording right. If you mean Java might get a more open license or Apache/BSD style license say that.
---- Berlin Brown http://www.newspiritcompany.
neither have they been too keen on helping out projects who bite their hands. As a result, the project to watch is the Apache Harmony Project. Given that Apache maintains a close relationship with Sun, hasn't burned their bridges,
The fact that ability to work with Java is based on how politically friendly your organization is to Sun seems, to me, to be the primary problem with the Java licensing situation. Look at Perl or Python or any number of "open source" languages, and your ability to work with, package, resell embed etc the langauge is in no way restricted by your ability to get along with Larry Wall or whoever. Now notice how those languages are flourishing in a lot of situations where Java is right now having problems.
This is, in fact, probably the primary advantage of open source, that the success of the product is not dependent on the behavior of the vendor, and the more I see situations like this (Java being held back in some situation because of something Sun did) the more I begin to see what the fanatic GNU hippies were talking about in the first place.
As a developer, I don't give a shit whose bridges with Sun are and aren't burned. I expect Sun to do whatever is necessary to make their product useful to me and Sun's other customers. That includes maximizing the ubiquity, growth and flexibility of the language. If that involves having *gasp* to actually work with organizations they're unfriendly with, then they either better well damn either do it or choose a licensing model which allows other organizations to grow the Java platform without Sun's help. If Sun can't do what is necessary to make their product the best one available, then at some point I'm going to have to look into the fact that I have other alternatives.
Anyway the license you cite is listed as being
as subject matter for learning and research
That's nice, but it isn't very useful for those of us who eventually have to get things done in the real world.
- Posted as anonymous coward because as a developer I have a business relationship with Sun, and I've seen what happens to people who "burn their bridges"!
" As if Java isn't slow enough, they open source it just in time as .NET is 100x better and faster." .net was that much faster than natively compiled C binaries, considering Java is anywhere between 75-95% percent of the speed of C (Statistics pulled out of nowhere, i remember last time i checked Java was expected to be around 90% of the speed of Compiled C i was guessing that improved) .net considerably faster than C ;)
Wow , i had no idea that
That would make
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
This doesn't really matter to Java detractors. IT types, usually not programmers, will bring up the same old tired clichés.
Same tired old cliches. I can tell you first hand that lots of major developers of Java and early advocates have been turned off directly by issues that could have been addressed by open sourcing it. But that won't stop you from your tired cliches that it doesn't matter, just because you don't want it to matter.
I was developing major applications with it before it reached 1.0, and still work with it quite a bit, but it becomes more and more irrelevant despite my best work because Sun wills it to be irrelevant. Even as a major early licensee of Java, basic problems were not considered important enough for Sun to solve, and it hasn't changed much.
Somewhere around the year 2000 Java became uncool especially with younger programmers. I guess because it became an institution taught in high schools everywhere. Maybe programmers feel Java is rammed down their throats so they champion less established languages even something by Microsoft.
Again, strong on cliche, very weak on technical understanding or demographic fact, but at least you contradict your prior nonsense that it is not programmers turning away.
Java really is the best thing out there for a lot of things. Sun can give away everything and detractors will be like: "OK but what about your first born child?"
Go whine somewhere else. You think you should dictate what is useful to us without giving us adequate control to meet our needs? We will continue to use Java less and less as other tools continue come forward that are more responsive to our needs. The stuff we run today in Java doesn't benefit from the JVM and will be ported away as performance becomes more important and other features we need to build in are still not available in Java, since it is not open.
The whole attitude that somehow open source is wanting more from Sun than it would contribute back is ignorant, uninformed, short sighted, etc. Sun and their apologists should get a clue. Open source would make it responsive to a much wider range of developers and would produce developments Sun was too blind to pursue or pursued way too late and too little. Any harm has already been done to a great extent by Sun's pig-headedness. They should go off in a corner and use it by themselves if they don't want to open it up.
Waiting for Java has become a dead issue. No one expects Sun to get a clue, so why are you still whining that some in the past thought they might.
How many steps are there?
excellent work
+5 jibberish
Javascript != Java
Outsourcing has what to do with this?
"If a company wants to run a giant professional website and has money to throw at it, they'll get WebLogic or WebSphere to run it."
Or they'll forego bloated commercial app servers and EJB and go with a lightweight open-source framework. These aren't toys - in fact the EJB 3 standard being developed now is largely based on ideas copied from these frameworks, as well as the Hibernate open-source persistence service.
The GPL isn't the only definition of Freedom or Free.