Java To Be Opened For Christmas?

MBCook writes "At the Oracle OpenWorld conference, Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced on Wednesday morning that Java would be opened within 30-60 days, which would would mean about Christmas Day at the latest. Sun first announced they would do this back in May at JavaOne but didn't give a date. We've seen rumblings before on this topic. Schwartz also commented on the companies Sun Fire servers, Sun's relationship with Oracle, and general trends."

Comments

64-bit

[compm375]

Now maybe we can have a Java plug-in for 64-bit browsers.

Re:64-bit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd settle for a Java that doesn't make my machine run slower than a frozen slug.

Re:64-bit

[thebluesgnr]

We already have one.

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/gcjwebplug in

[alpha, amd64, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc]

License

[Tribbin]

Under what license?

Re:License

[Ajehals]

The article only says it will be an OSI Approved License and I would suggest that that probably means the CCDL,

Re:Co-ffeee...

[Anonymous Coward]

1999 called, it wanted its lame comment back.

Re:Firefox : Iceweasel :: Sun Java : ???

[DragonWriter]

But if Sun Java is released under the GPL, I expect to see several more versions of Java, most of them incompatible with each other, coming out soon.

So? There already are several more versions of Java. What keeps the ones that succeed largely compatible isn't licensing (as the non-Sun, non-Microsoft ones are reverse-engineered, not licensed) but the fact that there is no interest in incompatible "Java". Releasing Sun's implementation under the GPL (or the CCDL, or, heck, into the public domain) isn't going to change that.

And HW accelerator licencing ...? ARM, AVR32, etc

[Big Jojo]

Still wondering if this means they'll be opening up specs on how the ARM Java acceleration works ... it would be nice to have some of those free JVMs able to use that to speed up their bytecode interpretation.

For those of you who don't know about this, most modern ARM CPUs -- like the ARM-926ejs as found in the Nokia 770 and many cell phones -- include three processor modes: (1) pure 32bit ARM instructions, (2) a 16-bit compressed version of ARM instructions called "Thumb", widely used in microcontrollers, (3) an 8-bit Java bytecode interpreter. The first two have public documentation. But ARM won't give docs to the last out, because Sun won't let them do that; you need a separate licence from Sun to get those documents. So it's fully within Sun's power to open up some widely available Linux-savvy hardware to run Java a lot better ...

There's another CPU that's in the same kind of boat, the new AVR32 from Atmel. You may have noticed that Linux 2.6.19-rc includes initial support for that architecture. AVR32 CPUs have analogues of (1) and (3) above ... but again, Atmel won't give docs to the Java acceleration out, because Sun won't let them do that. (And for background info: yes AVR32 is very new, likely its audience today is almost all developers, only one model of chip available so far.)

So how about it, Sun ... are you really going to open Java up??

Think outside the box

[Asztal_]

We need slower slugs.

Re:How many days are in your Java?

[Reverend528]

30-60 days

The time difference depends on whether or not the garbage collector runs during that time.

IBM Trolls

[javacowboy]

I can't believe how many IBM trolls are in this thread (and Slashdot as a whole) decrying Sun's lack of a track record in open sourcing their stuff.

Have they ever heard of NFS? OpenOffice? OpenSolaris?

Is there something wrong with the CDDL that's not wrong with the Mozilla license? From what I understand, the CDDL is similar to the Mozilla license but simpler. I invite every single one of those armchair critics to stop using Firefox if they're so adamant.

Unlike IBM (with the exception of Eclipse), Sun actually *open sources* stuff. I invite those IBM trolls to push their corporate master to open source WebSphere, DB2, Rational Rose, or Lotus Notes.