Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.