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: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?

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: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.