IBM Collaborating With Open Source Java Project

lord_rob the only on writes "According to news.com, IBM has begun participating in the open-source Java project Harmony and intends to contribute code to the initiative, according to a Big Blue executive. At this point, IBM's participation is limited to thoughts on design, but the company has plans to contribute code to the project in the future." From the article: "We really like to see the community get started, and they're still working out the rough edges of what they want to deliver. And we didn't want to disrupt that,"

Comments

Talk about fragmenting the standard...

[jarich]

Sun's reasoning for not open sourcing Java is that they didn't want to fragment the Java language with competing verions of Java.

Looks like ~not~ open sourcing Java is fragmenting the Java language after all!

Re:Talk about fragmenting the standard...

[ballstothat]

I completely agree with Sun's stance on not fragmenting their code. While their licensing isn't agreeable, there are millions of java powered items out there. If Java turned into a bunch of different flavors (insert mocha, vanilla, hazelnut joke here), then it would be a headache.

The JRE for Windows XP is already 15.4 MB. If there was 5 different REs that I had to download to use all the Java flavors, that wouldn't be cool.

I feel that Sun's thinking is sound from a business and usefulness perspective, even if it is starting to backfire.

Re:Talk about fragmenting the standard...

[luiss]

This project is implementing a Java Virtual Machine. How in the world does this fragment the Java Language any more than let's say Apple or IBM's many JVM implementations?

Now, if Harmony intends to "extend" the Java Language by lets say, adding new keywords, just as Microsoft did with J++ at one point, then you can start worrying about Java Language fragmentation (in which case Sun would not allow Harmony to call itself a Java(TM) Virtual Machine).

Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been this interesting and very quiet power struggle within the JCP between Sun and IBM. IBM keeps wanting to assert influence over Java and grow the language/platform in ways that they think would be good. Sun keeps trying to simultaneously

1. keep IBM from taking the language in directions other than Sun wanted to take it in, and
2. make the JCP a democratic and open process whereby any involved company can take the language in any direction they want.

This isn't because Sun is evil or malicious or anything; they're just confused about what they want. They honestly want Java to be an open, democratic standard, and they honestly want to control it.

The "control it" side of things keeps winning, because in the end Sun makes the JVM so they can technically decide what goes in and how it gets distributed.

This is why I think Harmony is interesting. Sun will no longer control the only good JVM, and if Sun can't stay at least as good as Harmony, then Sun will no longer control the primary JVM. This makes the JCP's democratic ideals a lot more attainable because Sun's just lost their biggest degree of control. IBM trying to weigh in on the side of Harmony, given this context, makes a LOT of sense. They can begin to grow the language how THEY wanted again.

This is going to be good for IBM, good for open source, and in the long run good for Sun once they realize that trying to control Java too much isn't really in their best interest.

so?

[ThatGeek]

"IBM's participation is limited to thoughts on design, but the company likely will contribute code to the project".

I put this through BabelFish's translator. Apparently, this could be taken to mean:

"A big company is going to do little to help out, but is willing to share credit for an open source project."

Me? cynical? Never!

Re:Eclipse?

[LDoggg_]

Eclipse is indeed open source.
In fact, fedora core 4 comes with a natively compiled version of eclipse and a 100% open source jvm implementation.
Still needs quite a bit of work, but has definetly come a long way

Here we go

[$RANDOMLUSER]

The Richard Stallmans of the world have long wanted Java to be an open source language, while Sun Microsystems has said that they want to be the single point of control for the language. The biug lawsuit between Sun and Microsoft was about Microsoft making unauthorised changes to the language spec. Through the Java Community Process, Sun has allowed developers at large to make suggestions and improvements to the language if Sun approved of them. Sun controls the specification of the language and the reference JVM implimentation. The battle isn't about the JVM being open source, it's about the language specification. Sun's fear is that by opening the specification, someone's going to say "You know, I've always felt the language should have pointers", and the language will fall into Creeping Featurism the way C++ did. The recent (1.5) introduction of template-like behavior, at the demands of the "more features" crowd is already a step in that direction. No matter how you slice it, it seems we're doomed to a Java with more and more new features (remove run-time array bounds checking for performance, anyone?) and more and more fragmentation.

Swing?

[ravenspear]

GCJ still only provides limited support for Swing. I don't think it can be said that it has "come of age" until that support is there in a form that at least remotely resembles javac.

Re:IBM could create Harmony overnight

[psykocrime]

IBM already has a complete JDK which actually used to be much better than Sun's in terms of efficiency etc. (not sure how it compares right now). They could just release the whole thing as F/OSS under the new JCP rules, and create Harmony overnight. Why have they not done this yet?

Because IBM's JDK wasn't written from scratch. It's based, to some degree, on Sun's code. I don't know how much Sun code is in IBM's JDK, or the exact details of the license between Sun and IBM, but I know IBM's JDK is subject to Sun licensing.