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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."
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.
It's part of the easing of license restrictions that currently make it difficult to incorporate Java in certain types of Free Software project, and that cause hassle for companies like RedHat and Novell/SUSE who sincerely want to distribute Java but more than that want their operating systems to be 100% Free Software.
It's funny. The prime difference between Open Source and Free Software is that OSS is married to a community based development model whereas Free Software is just the basic principle of it being Free. Everyone keeps using "Open Source" here, but Sun has, actually, been following the community based development model part of Open Source for years without making Java Free Software. If it's not Free Software, it's not Open Source, but Java's certainly proven you can have the advantages of Open Source without actually making your software open source.
So why are they doing this? Well, like I said in my first paragraph, the current license and environment is too restrictive for many significant potential adopters. They're finally recognising people want the freedom, not just an open development model.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
In the long run, this will make Java more portable too. It took the FreeBSD Foundation some serious time lobbying before they could distribute Java as a package. Even from ports (source, for the non-BSDies here), Java is a pain on FreeBSD, because the lack of support, crazy patchwork and the need to download everything by hand, whilst signing agreements.
I really hope that we can look forward to a working, recent Java version on FreeBSD without the old bugs and the trouble with OSS-principles in the near future. Kaffe / Classpath just isn't doing the trick. I wonder what this will do to OpenOffice.org.
It all depends on the license. I do hope this will draw some of the fine folks at Kaffe / GNU / Apache who have done a great job by recoding Java to Java itself. But then, if it isn't the GPLv3, RMS will probably keep screaming for a "real free" reversed engineered version of Java.
Well then, off to Flash... Adobe?
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
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