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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,"
- keep IBM from taking the language in directions other than Sun wanted to take it in, and
- 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.
"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!
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
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.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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).