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Sun Opens Up Enterprise Software
abscondment writes "Stating that "open source is the future" of the software industry, Sun's President and COO Jonathan Schwartz announced that Sun will be opening its enterprise software in a manner similar to Solaris 10. Sun is opening up the Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 Management software, and Sun developer tools, etc. - practically everything except Java - hoping to lure more developers and chief executive officers worldwide to use and deploy its enterprise software."
This is a great thing Sun is doing. I wouldn't argue with that. I just wish that they would open up Java also. If only.
And maybe FP? (literally)
Java can be protected adequately through the trademark. Unless it is 100% compatible, you can't call it Java (and jusging by the crippled VMs you get on most 'phones these days, they don't even seem to be enforcing that...). Relaxing the licensing constraints would mean I wouldn't have to jump through hoops to get Java to run on FreeBSD, and people could get it working on things like BeOS / YellowTab. At the moment, it's write once, run anywhere (as long as anywhere is Windows/Linux/Solaris x86 or Solaris SPARC).
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If Sun were to GPL Java, they've have every Tom, Dick and Harry making an "improved platform independant language." They lose the marketshare, and browsers/websites have to start supporting a million little random Java-like applets.
You mean exactly like Python, Ruby, Perl and so on are suffering horribly from all their incompatible forks?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
It sounds like you are joking, but one can never tell here - you are joking, right?
sic transit gloria mundi
I can see where you're coming from, and honestly, it feels a bit like that to me as well. Sun didn't make their fortune on open source (although they have been involved with open software and open standards for quite some time), so I suspect the attitude towards it is mixed.
In fact, I recently went to an OpenSolaris users' group meeting at my local Sun facility, and one of the Sun people did mention that open sourcing Solaris was kind of a hard sell with the management, but that the "a rising tide benefits us all" argument did eventually win out. So, are they true believers? Undoubtedly, many Sun employees are, and surely some are skeptical. But even if 100% of them aren't behind it, you have to give them credit for being willing to try new things.
Now, on to the question of whether this is a Hail Mary. My own opinion is that if it were just this one thing in isolation, that wouldn't be a good sign. But, over the last year, Sun has done lots of things that kick ass. Solaris 10 kicks ass. ZFS, which they've just released, kicks ass[1]. (As the ZFS slides say, "ZFS Objective: End the Suffering", and that refers to the tedium of storage management on ALL platforms.) Sun is already working on projects and starting new projects to address shortcomings with Solaris on the desktop. Though they of course support gcc, the newest version of their own proprietary compiler (and dev environment), Sun Studio 11, is now free as in beer. And it's available for both Solaris and Linux, and pretty clearly generates better code on SPARC and is pretty competitive on x86.
Some of their new Opteron hardware is quite cool and cost competitive with similar Dell systems[2]. And they also have their 8-core, 4-simultaneous-hardware-thread Niagara chips.
The point is, like in years past, it can once again be said that Sun is doing cool stuff. So if you want to go with the football analogies, it could be a Hail Mary, or it could be that halftime has just ended, Sun has just studied the films to see what they need to adjust, and they're back on the field and ready to make something happen.
[1] Check out the (PDF) slides about it, or either of the two demos, or some of the other documentation.
[2] In fact, compare the cheapest 1U Dell server with the cheapest 1U Sun server. The Dell has a Celeron with 256KB cache in a server (!!!), and the Sun has an Opteron with 1MB cache. And the Sun is $745, whereas the Dell is $999. The only negative with the Sun is that it has no disk, but that option is $150, leaving it at $895, still over $100 cheaper than the Dell. Oh yeah, and the Sun hardware is qualified to run RHEL, SUSE Linux, Solaris 10, or Windows.
Not only can you see it, but you can build it, tweak it, and even deploy it within your company. You simply can't distribute it.
This gives most of the freedoms of OSS, but keeps the core stable and consistent within the hand of Sun.
I'm not sure if you can distribute patches freely, however (BSD does, but they're different and have a relationship with Sun already).
Save for the most technical pedant, Java is "Free enough".