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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."
"Source code for Java already is available and has been for 10 years", said James Gosling. I guess Open Source means they want free developers.
Long live the programmer-letariat!
"While the Copyright exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no Copyright."
Depending on the license that they choose, OSS purists can now utilize Java in their programs. OpenOffice.org ran into some issues when it began using Java to power some of its components. Hopefully the license under which this is released will be acceptable.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
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.
Don't use the "d"-word here. ;)
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Do you have any data that shows that Mono deployment in the enterprise is increasing, relative to java deployment? Because, in my experience of 8 years of enterprise java, Mono is not making any strides. It's a backwater that a few people are toiling in.
If they had done this right 5 years ago, .NET would have been stillborn and Sun would be the worlds leading application platform vendor. That's a desirable and advantageous position for a hardware vendor to be in. Instead we're 2 months before a release and we still don't have enough details to consider java for future projects. With the benefit of hindsight, the best business decision Sun could have made back in 2001 would have been to relicense the java source code like they were being asked to.
Apache seems to be banking pretty hard on it.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
It's definitely the class libraries that make Java "java". The language is straightforward and there are decent JVM workalikes, but developers write their code around the class libraries. The problem I've always found with Java is the bloat of the class libraries, so I'd like to see open source distributions make lean and mean Java variants.
A perfect Java distro would maybe drop all the deprecated methods (will Sun ever do that? Java 1.6 is a good opportunity...) and unbundle some of the least-used stuff like the CORBA and RMI stuff. Heck, even Swing and AWT should be optional packages. Why couldn't Java be structured sort of like a Java Web Start install, pulling in libraries only if needed. Almost everything is connected to the internet these days and good caching of libraries from trusted sources would be a decent way to get full functionality with a smaller initial footprint.
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
Personally its a rather nice language.
Oh, as far as:
Unless you know something the rest of us don't, this strikes me more as spreading FUD then anything else.
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Exactly. Free Software has plenty of JVMs and compilers. Heck, the Free Software world has too many JVMs and compilers. What's needed are Java compatible class libraries under a license that is both amenable to proprietary and Free Software developers.
At this point Sun is simply trying to draw support away from the various Free Java implementations. Sun knows that if the Free Software implementations ever become popular that its chances of controling Java long term are essentially flushed down the toilet. Sun reacted too late with Solaris, and it is desperate to keep Java from suffering a similar fate. So it is doing everything in its power to keep people away from Free Software Java-alike systems.
If Sun were serious it would A) concentrate on releasing the Java class libraries, and B) it would have given Java developers some guidance on the license that it will be using. Everything else is just fluff.
What is this "native executable" you speak of? To quote morpheus, "Do you think those are instructions you are running?" Pretty much every so-called native program you run is passed through the ld.so interpreter that relocates the binary and loads shared libraries. Grep the kernel sources for "ld.so".
./ it.
The only reason you have to ship a JVM with your app is because a) Microsoft intentionally sabotages compatibility (by strong-arming Dell, etc not to ship Java) and b) because Linux distros can't legally ship it because of license restrictions. Java apps work fine on a Mac without shipping their own JVM.
With a JVM installed as a standard system component you run your Java programs just like any other program. You just double-click or
Mono has convenient language syntax with C#, but that's it. The CLR bytecode cannot be interpreted well, so hotspot like optimizations are far harder to do. It's a VM trying to be everything to everybody, so it's not really great at anything. It's startup time is far slower than a gcj'd Java program and it's throughput is much less than a hotspot'd one. The only real benefit is that it is oss.
I know, I shouldn't feed a troll....
You are the reason they were reluctant to make it (fully) open source.
You obviously are confident you know more about what makes a good language than the designers of Java do. Have you read even one paper at jcp.org? Have you looked at the people who make up the JCP? IBM, Apple, Cisco, Intel, HP, ATI, NVidia, Creative Labs, Google (!), Apache, Apogee, Namco ... you really think you're smarter than their combined intellect and months of discussion? Trust me, you're not.
I'm sure you and a lot of others are already giddy with excitement over the idea of making a "better Java" with const and operator overloading.
When you understand the "less is more" principle, you'll begin to understand why all your pet features don't belong in the language.
The Internet is full. Go away.
Mmm.. thats my take as well. .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... .Net route is more popular within other market segments ? Anyone working in another industry care to comment ?
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
Maybe the
Yeah. The individual usually is smarter than the group.
Badass Resumes
Unless you're posting that from an AT&T Unix console, you're benefitting from people who had the hubris to think you're wrong.
The road of progress was paved by people who thought the current way of doing things was dumb, and who set out to find a better alternative. This is generally regarded as a good thing (except by people with a vested interest in the old ways).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
But Java would be so much better if it was more like $MY_FAVOURITE_LANGUAGE! For example, it's lacking some features found in PHP like being mixable with HTML code and not using namespaces! And it should have the syntactic goodness of both Ruby and Haskell! Speaking of Haskell, why doesn't Java use type inference everywhere? Forcing the user to give a type only makes things complicated. Also, function declarations should not look like String foobar(int blah, int fhqwhgads) - foobar::Integer -> Integer -> String is much better for a completely nonspecific reason that everyone with two brain cells to rub together could see (just as he could see that such declarations should be optional since they could be inferred by the compiler). Also, Java should run on Dotnet and use FLTK as the main GUI toolkit.
And Javadoc should translate all source code comments into Esperanto.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)