Simon Phipps on the Process of Opening Java

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday July 24, 2006 @06:07AM from the sniff-the-air-from-the-vacuum-can dept.

twofish writes "Simon Phipps, the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, has reaffirmed Sun's commitment to Open Source in an interview with computerworld. The focus of the interview is Simon's efforts to fully open source Java. He points out that many problems need to be resolved before Java can be open sourced — ownership, legal, access, encumbrances and relationships with Java licensees. It took Sun a full five years to solve these issues with Solaris. However Simon predicts that it won't take anything near this amount of time to complete the task with Java. Of course, one of the other concerns for OS Java is the resulting incompatible versions and breaking of the Java WORA model (Gosling himself has always been particularly concerned about incompatible forks resulting in the introduction of an open source version of Java) and this opens up additional problems for the open source Java model."

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Re:Incompatible Java forks by ClosedSource · 2006-07-24 09:12 · Score: 1, Troll

"MS forks and names its product 'J++'. They keep it just compatible enough that it segments the Java development community."

J++ didn't segment the Java development community, if it had been allowed to continue it would have brought Windows developers in the Java world. Instead Sun sued MS and doomed Java to the minor leagues of desktop development.