Java to be Open Sourced in October

thePowerOfGrayskull writes "Sun is now stating that the Hotspot JVM and javac will be open-sourced in October of this year, with the rest to follow by the end of 2007. There is still no word as to which license it will be released under. For those who haven't seen it yet, Sun has previously opened a public developer community site for soliciting feedback and providing updates about the process."

Comments

Re:Big deal for OSS

[silvaran]

Well Joe can release whatever Java interpreter he wants, there's no guarantee that anyone's going to use it. You could have 500 different forks of the Java code (license permitting), but unless they provide some huge advantage and become mainstream (see egcs/gcc, which turned out to be a good thing from what I've heard), the conformant Java interpreters/compilers/runtimes are going to remain the de facto ones to use. And Joe can sit there and run his modified version of the Java platform all he wants, while everyone else happily sticks to the comformant platforms.

Re:Closed Java is worse then closed C#

[powerlord]

C# is just a language. There is a specification for it that has been submitted to ECMA, as there are for lots of the pieces that make up MicroSoft's ".Net" initiative. Not all their ideas are bad ones, and anyone is free to implement standards.

To quote Mono's FAQ page:

The Mono Project is an open development initiative sponsored by Novell to develop an open source, UNIX version of the Microsoft .NET development platform. Its objective is to enable UNIX developers to build and deploy cross-platform .NET Applications. The project implements various technologies developed by Microsoft that have now been submitted to the ECMA for standardization.

Personally its a rather nice language.

Oh, as far as:

There are also potential patent issues (I can't believe that there would be _no_ patents that cover C#.)

Unless you know something the rest of us don't, this strikes me more as spreading FUD then anything else.

Re:Does it still matter?

[ahmetaa]

well.. yes, java is still the most used platform in business and it is getting bigger. who is "we" you are talking about anyway? "we" here use java in all big applications and very happy about it.

Re:Big deal for OSS

[mrogers]

There are already free JVMs and free Java compilers. The problem is the class libraries. Java's standard libraries are huge, and free reimplementations are having a hard time keeping up. Without the libraries, open source versions of javac and the JVM won't bring us significantly closer to the goal of a completely free Java platform.

Re:Closed Java is worse then closed C#

[jeswin]

Mod parent up.

The patent FUD concerning Mono is now dead, and Mono is included in Fedora are Suse distributions. I am sure Novell would have invested considerable effort in analyzing potential issues. Mono is a from scratch implementation. And no surprise, Miguel appeared in the Microsoft Technet Video explaining Mono last week and it was on slashdot.

Here is a nice article by Paul Graham on SW Patents, which was Slashdotted earlier. What he says makes a lot of sense: But I doubt Microsoft would ever be so stupid. They'd face the mother of all boycotts. And not just from the technical community in general; a lot of their own people would rebel.

Re:Good

[THEbwana]

Mmm.. thats my take as well.
My background is 9 years in Finance/IT in various technical (mostly programming / systems engineering) roles in three European countries, working in financial institutions of the size 30K-130K employees.
The only .Net stuff I've seen is on the client side of some internally developed trading systems. The serverside, however, is usually run as J2EE apps running in one of the many servlet/ejb containers you see in the marketplace nowadays... J2EE simply rules the serverside and SWING apps are seen quite frequently. My guess is that banks will be happier extending eclipse when writing their client apps than going the .Net route...
Maybe the .Net route is more popular within other market segments ? Anyone working in another industry care to comment ?

TCK and calling it "Java"

[kmahan]

To me the real question is "When will Sun be releasing the various TCKs?" The conformance suites are what is needed to validate any of the java implementations and call them "Java" in the eyes of Sun (and their lawyers).

As James Gosling has said -- the source to the JVMs and libraries has been available for 10 years. But the TCKs aren't available in source or binary form.