Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Java to be Open Sourced in October

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the coffee-in-the-fall dept.

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."

1 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Okay, but what does "open source" mean? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is this "open source" as in "open source"?

    Is this "open source" as in Apple's "public source" Darwin project, where they're basically going "you can see and compile all the code, but no way are you going to be redistributing this as any kind of commercial project"?

    Is this "open source" as in Microsoft's "shared source" projects, where it's totally not open source at all except in a PR sense?

    Is this "open source" as in Sun's Solaris "open sourcing", where it's open source in all technical senses, but it's under an unbelievably elaborate license which exists for no reason except to engender GPL incompatibility and keep Linux from benefiting from the source release, which effectively scares everyone away from the project?

    Cuz really, unless "Java to be Open Sourced" really means "Java to be Open Sourced", it won't make a difference, acceptance of Java will continue to be held back by the perceived closedness of the Java language and real linux-unfriendliness of the Java runtime, and languages like C#/Mono will continue to make inroads until Apache finishes their Harmony project.