Simon Phipps on the Process of Opening Java

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."

Comments

Incompatible Java forks

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosling himself has always been particularly concerned about incompatible forks resulting in the introduction of an open source version of Java)

So hold onto the trademark, the same way the Mozilla foundation do, and only let implementations that pass a rigorous testsuite use it.

Re:Incompatible Java forks

[Brandybuck]

To play devil's advocate, I think what they're worried about is another J++, where someone (Microsoft) creates an almost-but-not-quite Java, and then you end up with "write once run nowhere else". I don't necessarily agree with that worry, but I strongly suspect that's what's in Sun's head.

Re:Incompatible Java forks

[Bogtha]

I think what they're worried about is another J++, where someone (Microsoft) creates an almost-but-not-quite Java

Which of these two scenarios do you think is most likely to cause that situation?

• People who object to Sun's non-open license create a from-scratch implementation of Java, or
• People take Sun's open-source Java and use it directly.

It seems fairly obvious to me that forcing people to create another Java implementation instead of letting them use the "canonical version" as they wish is far more likely to bring about another J++ situation.

Re:Incompatible Java forks

[Tim C]

People who object to Sun's non-open license create a from-scratch implementation of Java

But they can't call it Java, as that's a trademark owned by Sun, and so merely have a runtime that's nominally compatible with Java.

In that situation there is a danger that people will start using it in preference to the real Java, as "it's practically the same, only better (in $ways)", but then that's a danger posed by .NET or any other similar technology.

Re:Incompatible Java forks

[IamTheRealMike]

Unfortunately the fact that Mozilla trademarks things up the wazoo did not stop Debian from forking XULRunner to make it more "UNIXy". Ultimately trademarks must be supported with lawsuits if they are to be effective and unsurprisingly there isn't much appetite for suing open source projects that badly fork a codebase.

Re:Incompatible Java forks

[fmoliveira]

If J++ were created with an GPL-like opensouced java, it would be easy to port J++ to run in linux and firefox, which was the whole point of making J++ incompatible.

It's not Microsoft trying to kill java like with J++. They want their java to continue being theirs. They dont want to give it away.

Re:Incompatible Java forks

[LizardKing]

sure, which is only slightly different from the current truth: "write once, debug everywhere"

It's not that I disbelieve you, but could you give me examples where you've needed to do something platform specific with code written for J2SE or J2EE? I have written several very large Java apps (both standalone and web applications) but never had issues with running the resulting code on different platforms. Heck, the last system I worked on ran out of the box on Solaris, Windows, Linux and NetBSD. The only time I've run into platform specific issues is with handheld devices running a third party JVM. I do keep on seeing these complaints about "write once, debug anywhere", but never had an opportunity to find out why.

Java already breaks the WORA model

[MarkByers]

I have a Java client on my webserver and half the mails I get are because the Java client doesn't work on people's computer. Usually this is because they have some old version of Microsoft's Java Runtime installed, which only supports Java 1.1 (badly).

What a mess! I can't really see how opening it up will make it any worse than it already is today.

Re:Java already breaks the WORA model

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Usually this is because they have some old version of Microsoft's Java Runtime installed, which only supports Java 1.1 (badly). What a mess! I can't really see how opening it up will make it any worse than it already is today.

Okay so MS broke the law and released an intentionally broken JVM to try and kill Java as a dev platform. The courts stopped them, but you're still dealing with the mess with a few remaining legacy systems from that time. You don't see how giving MS an opportunity to bundle a new broken version on every computer sold in the world could make things worse?

Re:Java already breaks the WORA model

[IflyRC]

I wonder at times if Sun really messed up by challenging Microsoft. If Sun had allowed J# to continue as it was the java runtime updates would more than likely be included in every windows update package.

Re:Java already breaks the WORA model

[Andy Dodd]

In my experience, the WORA model was broken from the beginning.

The majority of "interesting" Java applications I've seen were restricted to a single platform for various reasons, mostly because they apparently (somehow) were making platform-specific system calls. (I don't know the exact details of this, all I DO know is that there are plenty of Java applications out there that are restricted to a single platform for whatever reason. I may be wrong about the reasons, but the fact is that WORA failed on the desktop)

What about WORA for J2ME (i.e. on mobile devices)? The situation seems even worse. If you go to the download site for nearly any Java game designed for mobile phones, they will list different downloads for every model of phone they support, with varying filesizes. Not a single Java application designed for other phones has worked with the JVM available for PalmOS 5 devices such as my Treo 650.

If WORA had ever actually worked, I'd accept Java's unwillingness to break it. Unfortunately for that excuse, it's hard to break something that is already broken.

Re:Java already breaks the WORA model

[asv108]

I love how the only thing some people tend to associate Java with, are poorly implemented applets.

Re:Java already breaks the WORA model

[jilles]

I don't know about your definition of interesting but most of the java stuff I work with on a daily basis works unmodified on the three big desktop platforms (and probably everything else that runs java 1.5) and does so for the ten or so years I've been developing Java. This stuff combined is probably several million lines of code. Also all of the stuff I write in Java is 100% crossplatform, barring the odd jdk bug that somehow fell through the 60000 or so unit tests they unleash on the jdk nowadays (just a disclaimer, can't recall ever encountering one). In my previous company we developed on windows, had staging servers running linux and deployed more or less blindly to our customer sites running windows 2000, 2003, various flavours of linux and even some sun machines. Worked every time. Portability was never an issue. Not even having to test for portability issues is a huge time and cost saver.

A good example of a portable J2ME app is opera mini which exists in only two variants the both of which work across pretty much all java capable phones except maybe for the really crappy ones, such as your Palm based one (blame Palm, not Sun). J2ME is a modular specification which unfortunately leads to the interesting situation that the more of the modules your app uses the less portable it becomes. Pretty much all of the modules are optional and with MIDP 1.0 many vendors added loads of vendor specific APIs as well. Many applications written for that mixed bag of standard and non standard extensions are not portable.

MIDP 2.0 mostly removes the need for vendor specific APIs (though many vendors still ship them). Upcoming MIDP 3.0 is even better apparently. of course many games need to make assumptions about device specifics (e.g. screen size, number of colours, keyboard layout) which unfortunately leads to many portability issues. These problems are hard to solve and currently J2ME seems the best solution the market has come up with. Most device specific binaries of J2ME apps merely include some minor modifications, optimizations and packaging. I agree that testing for all that is a major PITA for developers. If you have a better solution that works for non trivial applications across the thousands of different brands and types of mobile phones, get some venture capital and get rich!

Re:Java already breaks the WORA model

[Decaff]

I have a Java client on my webserver and half the mails I get are because the Java client doesn't work on people's computer. Usually this is because they have some old version of Microsoft's Java Runtime installed, which only supports Java 1.1 (badly).

What a mess! I can't really see how opening it up will make it any worse than it already is today.

Guess what! I have some Linux software that won't run on the 1.0.x kernel or with really early versions of libc. By the same reasoning this must surely mean that Linux is broken and you can't write the same code for different platforms.

Of course this is nonsense, and isn't what WORA is about, and certainly shouldn't have been rated 'insightful'. WORA does not include some kind of time machine facility to allow software written to current VM and language and library specifications to work on 10-year old VMs and old libraries. The idea is, of course, that if you write for Java 1.4.2, your software will run on any Java 1.4.2 VM (or later) on any platform.

Re:Java already breaks the WORA model

[Tim C]

Another good hint is when developers have to "port" their application from their own desktop to work properly on the test server.

In 6 or so years of doing server-side Java development, I have never needed to do that, nor have I ever heard of anyone needing to do so. I humbly suggest that if someone does find themselves needing to do so, they've done something very wrong.

Re:Java already breaks the WORA model

[miro2]

Have you ever written code which uses the java.net.NetworkInterface class? Thats a core part of the language, and its pretty damn easy to get code which runs completely differently on Windows and Linux simply because they are going to provide different NetworkInterface implementations (and frankly, a different number of NetworkInterfaces).

Quit the talking

[Alphager]

or at least talk about some facts. All we hear from Sun is blabla about how they will open-source parts of Java in one or two years. What i want to know: -Which parts of Java? -WHICH LICENSE ?

Other Open Source languages don't seem to suffer

[Burdell]

There are many open source programming languages already (perl, python,
etc.), and they don't seem to have a problem with forking or
compatibility.

If Sun fosters a good development community, there shouldn't be a
problem.

Exactly

[sterno]

It is fair to say that down the line even when they do opensource it, Sun's version will be the defacto standard. Figure if they and IBM work together on new versions, there's a pretty good guarantee that there won't be any major forks. Sure, there will be forks, but invariably those forks won't be what the average corporate server is running on, etc. Since it's open source, any of the good changes from those forks can be rolled back into the main Sun standard.

I can understand Sun's fear as Java has been a huge part of their business, but I think as long as they keep pushing the standard forward forks will be irrelevant.

Re:Exactly

[beemishboy]

Not that IBM is waiting to fork it, but one of the primary companies Sun worries about forking is IBM - looking at Eclipse with its SWT instead of Swing for instance.

Re:Exactly

[fm6]

It is fair to say that down the line even when they do opensource it, Sun's version will be the defacto standard.

You're somewhat misinformed. Sun's implementation has never been a basis for determining what's "standard". That's because Sun's implementation, like every other Java implementation (and there are quite a few) is required to adhere to a written specification.

People (including everybody at Sun) often say "Java" when they mean "Sun's Java implementation". That can be misleading. When you talk about "open sourcing Java" you're really talking about open sourcing a particular implementation of Java.

JavaPosse discussion

[tcopeland]

The JavaPosse had some notes on this a while back and they seem to keep an eye on the issue. That podcast definitely worth listening to once or twice a week to keep up with the latest news.

Bizarro version

[Jonboy X]

Simon Phipps, the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, has reaffirmed Sun's waning commitment to Open Source in an interview with some dude in bar over the weekend. "Sun tried the free-software thing. The end result was: Dirty hippies can run Solaris on their crappy little x86 boxes for free, and our stock is still circling the drain. Sun learned their lesson, and my job is rapidly being deprecated. I'll be folding sweaters at the Gap before Thanksgiving."

I think they mean the "WODE" model.

[Valdrax]

Write-Once, Debug Everywhere.

Solaris - solved?

[kripkenstein]

It took Sun a full five years to solve these issues with Solaris.

Solved? We should be so lucky. Things are far from solved. If Sun had released Solaris under the GPL, that would be good and done. Instead, it's under their own CDDL, which isn't easily compatible with the far-more-common GPL. This leads to issues for interesting projects like GNU/Solaris (Nexenta), which should have been quickly welcomed by the Open Source community. Instead, Sun's choice of the CDDL makes things complicated where they shouldn't be.

So, in short, I would not say that Sun 'solved' these 'problems' with Solaris, and I sincerely hope they do a better job with Java.

Re:Solaris - solved?

[Petersko]

"Solved? We should be so lucky. Things are far from solved. If Sun had released Solaris under the GPL, that would be good and done. Instead, it's under their own CDDL, which isn't easily compatible with the far-more-common GPL. This leads to issues for interesting projects like GNU/Solaris (Nexenta), which should have been quickly welcomed by the Open Source community. Instead, Sun's choice of the CDDL makes things complicated where they shouldn't be. "

Sun solved "their" problems. I highly doubt they took all that time to solve "your" problems. Their measure of success is not how they've complied with the open source community, it's how they fared in meeting their own needs.

What exactly did you expect?

Re:Solaris - solved?

[kripkenstein]

You're pointing at a problem that to Sun wasn't a problem. They *WEREN'T* aming for GPL compatibility.

I guess they weren't, since they didn't. And this is certainly a problem for the Open Source community. But this is also a problem for *Sun*, I would argue. What are the chances of OpenSolaris taking off, if the vast majority of the Open Source community can't use its code with the code they are used to? They can't improve OpenSolaris as they would like, and vice versa.

The whole CDDL issue seems to be an attempt to challenge Linux. Perhaps they envision a 'two-power' future for Open Source, where there is the GNU/Linux camp, under the GPL, and the Solaris camp, under the CDDL, and no code shall pass between them. This sounds a bit like the cold war to me (but maybe I'm just too old and/or senile, and mixing my metaphors).

To get back to the point, Sun open-sourced Solaris at a time when there was already a large and fruitful Open Source community. They chose not to play nice with that community, and seem to want to start a new base of power. If this is their 'solution', I'm not sure what the problem was. I find it hard to envision a promising future for OpenSolaris under current conditions.

That's a popular method.

[jd]

• The "red book" that defined the CD standard was the main reason CDs were as interchangable as they were. DVDs, which have no such rigorous standard to meet, tend to be less predictable.
  
• IPv6 hasn't got an "official" centrally-run test suite, but such suites for the purpose of certification do exist.
  
• C follows standards, rather than official regression tests, so you do get a lot more variation in quality and interchangability. In general, though, it demonstrates that simply defining a central standard is adequate for basic stuff.
  
• POSIX used a mix of standards and official testing, and had a big impact on the interoperability of Unix systems - though nowhere near as much as seems to have been hoped.
  
• Standards and tests by committee seem to be a Very Bad Idea. CORBA and SQL followed this road and have resulted in guaranteed inefficiency - apparently for the purpose of promoting the "extended" packages released by the vendors who created the standards in the first place.
  

If the process is followed - hey, that's great, but is needs to be done right if it is to be worth the doing.

open java equals forks for major vendors

[Fedarkyn]

other open languages (like phyton) don't have forks because a fork wouldn't do any good to the forker. major application server suppliers could make a lot of profit with a vendor lock implemented with gradual non conformities with its JVM. and a open source implementation of the JVM wouldn't make any difference for the non religious free/open source zealot.

Re:open java equals forks for major vendors

[mark_lybarger]

they have their own fork of a jvm. the big boys with their own jvm all have licensed sun's jvm and then tweaked it to their platform. bea purchased that blazing fast, jrockit, x86 jvm. what were the origins of that one? http://weblogic.sys-con.com/read/43022.htm that's right, it's ripped from sun's jvm.

lots of folks have considered creating a full fledged java environment. they end up taking sun's and tweaking it. a full blown jvm is just plain hard to do. the gnu folks have been trying it for eons now, and found it was just plain hard to do. all those gui classes really make things challenging.

from what i hear the certification tests are laughable.

Re:Someone has to say it

[grammar fascist]

Java sucks *and* it's closed source. I'll stick to C, Python and Perl thank you.

Naw. Here's the real deal, from someone who knows quite a few languages:

- Java is adequate for just about every programming task
- Java's generics are mostly adequate
- Java's GUI support is good once you let Swing twist your head into a fleshy knot
- Java's library support is above average
- Java's floating-point performance is quite good, especially with HotSpot
- The HotSpot runtime is freakin' amazing at what it does
- The Java language is wordy, which mostly has to do with strict typing (and lately, from adding generics)
- Server-side Java (JSPs, servlets, etc.) is unnecessarily complicated and probably designed by Satan himself

Hope that helps.

Re:As a web app developer...

[Reverend528]

AJAX and DHTML are terrible for writing web servers. That's why I write all of my web applications in javascript and XUL. It takes only a small amount of rdf to turn firefox into a full-featured web server, and the pages it serves are pretty much guaranteed to look good in any gecko-based browser. Though, every once and a while the server experiences problems when someone ignores the post-it-note on the monitor and starts using the it to read slashdot.

Re:As a web app developer...

[Brandybuck]

Just because all you have is a hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Chief Open Source Officer?

[CherniyVolk]

Please.... someone, tell me why there needs to be an "officer"--much less a "cheif"--within a corporate environment. Aside from convention, what practical use would such a high paying position render? Management? Bah, the realities of management... is a given with shuttles exploding on international television and multi-billion dollar corporations such as Enron, to the everyday corporate life of meaningless and unproductive meetings setting deadlines, project goals and planning... it's all crap, and never useful.

But, even if it's "management"... it's interesting that a corporation would feel the need for such heirarchy to "manage" any aspect of a system which itself, has no such structure.

Honestly

[Rorian]

I really like Java the way it is now - One single download of the OFFICIAL JRE and you can run pretty much anything that any website can throw at you, run a multitude of Java-based programs and you never really have to worry about having the right libraries etc. cause it's all _just there_ (with the exception of some applications which do require free java libraries.. most of the good applications manage to bundle everything in one neat package though).

Open Source Java would be nice because you'd never really have to worry about Sun turning around and charging on a subscription or per-seat basis for the JRE or JDK, although I don't think thats ever going to be in their interests anyway.

Having offshoots of Java which are almost JRE compatible but just have a little extra here and a little extra there is probably just going to confuse everything a lot. With any luck OSS developers will realize this and simply contribute to mainstream Java, but I guess time will tell what actually happens.

Re:Other Open Source languages don't seem to suffe

[955301]

ever used perl for win32? There were differences between it and unix' perl versions.

And it's naive to think that python or Perl are good examples. There was such huge energy behind Java in the commercial world that Microsoft made a clone. You better believe J++ would come back again if Sun gave a half a chance for it to sneak back in.

Re:As a web app developer...

[BigCheese]

Hmmm, no +1 Funny mods. You should have wrapped that one with some sort of humor indicator.

If you are serious, seek help.

Who will fund future development?

[Kunta Kinte]

My main concern with Java being Open-Sourced is that Sun may lose its incentive to continue funding Java development.

Java is not Python nor Perl. Even then, how long has Perl6 been in development? "It's ready when it's ready" is not good enough to much of the corporate world.

People asking for Java to be open-sourced believe that this will increase the amount of resources put into Java. I'm not so sure.

Re:Who will fund future development?

[chromatic]

Even then, how long has Perl6 been in development? "It's ready when it's ready" is not good enough to much of the corporate world.

The corporate world can deal with it, or it can fund development. As a multi-year volunteer on Perl 6 design and implementation, I can proudly say that the corporate world's opinion doesn't matter unless it's willing to do something about it.

How long has Perl6 been in development?

[Kunta Kinte]

There are many open source programming languages already (perl, python, etc.), and they don't seem to have a problem with forking or compatibility.

And how long has Perl6 been in development?

Sure there hasn't been a fork. That's because there aren't enough resources to development even the main branch!

Perl, Python are large scale under-funded open-source projects and thus highlight what I believe to be one of the main reasons not to open-source Java just now.

We haven't answered the question of who will fund future development...

MS broke the WORA model

[bharlan]

You must be thinking of J++, since J# appeared much later with .NET, long after the contract lawsuit.

J++ wasn't java. Byte code from J++ included new non-optional instructions, violated the specification, and thus could not run on any VM but Microsoft's. Microsoft's VM did not support 1.1 features for handling native code. How would Sun have benefited from a non-java VM pretending to be java?

Re: Someone has to say it

[Dolda2000]

I agree with the OP in sticking to C, Python and Perl, and it is for exactly some of the reasons that you listed. Java is, indeed, adequate for just about every programming task. For almost any programming task, however, there will be a language which is a perfect fit, which makes Java, in its adequateness, inferior for that particular task. I am lazy (as programmers should be), so I really dislike the wordieness of which you speak. I do work as a Java developer, and I have felt very hindered by the language in almost anything I do. Quite often I encounter subproblems that take 10+ lines in Java, which could be solved in a single, small and elegant s-expr in Scheme, or a single line of Perl. It is also quite cumbersome to do serious data structure mangling in Java, considering that you either have to define an entire class just to do simple things, or do so much type casting with the java.util structures that half of the code will just be type casts (and it isn't made any better by the facts that type names in Java tend to be very long and that the java.util collections can't store primitive data types).

I do find Java a good fit for a certain class of programming tasks -- namely those which require the software to run on a diversity of platforms. In that regard, I don't think anything can beat Java. If only Windows shipped with a good JRE...

However, I do disagree with some of your points. For example, no matter how good Swing is for programming, it will always suck since it renders widgets itself. Even though it has pluggable look-and-feel, it isn't possible to always make it look like a native application (try to write a look-and-feel for "the currently selected GTK2 theme", for example...). Also, even though Java's library support may be good, it quite much sucks that it is impossible to do OS-specific calls. I realize that that is because of the WORA principle, but it quite much sucks that it is impossible to, for instance, write Unix programs that use setuid in Java. I cannot imagine that it would hurt to add OS-specific calls for programs that just don't care about being OS-independent (especially not if they were added in seperate packages, like os.posix or os.win32, so that they won't be confused with OS-independent classes), right? By the way -- yes, I know about JNI and, no, I don't think it counts.

Basically, I think that the JVM and the class library are pretty nice (not perfect by a long shot, however), but the Java language itself just sucks. I have often considered making an alternative language that compiles to Java class files.

Re: Someone has to say it

[espressojim]

I haven't had to cast an object since I started using java 1.5 18 months ago. Generics, look into them. Also, you can put primitives into collections (via autoboxing).

Java 1.5 made the language a LOT nicer and more expressive.

Re:How long has Perl 6 been in development?

[chromatic]

And how long has Perl6 been in development?

Perl 6 has had five or six funded man-years of development. By my estimation, Microsoft developers spend as much time on-clock reading e-mail in a week.

I've already opened Java

[jamesjw]

I've already opened Java
And I can tell you the lid reads "WARNING: HOT CONTENTS"