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Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL
prostoalex writes "The embargo is off, and Associated Press is reporting on Sun releasing Java under GPL. Sun is hoping that this step will attract more developers, as well as extend the lifespan of Java. The article notes that this is 'one of the largest additions of computer code to the open-source community', and that Java is currently being run on something like 3.8 Billion devices worldwide." From the article: "Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software, said the company hopes to turn more developers into Java programmers, who may then create additional software to support Sun products. 'The open-sourcing of this really means more — more richness of offerings, more capability, more applications that consumers will get to use,' Green said. 'The platform itself will become a place for innovation.' All the Java source code is expected to be released by March 2007, Green said. The move covers all Java technology, which includes software that runs on handheld devices, personal computers and servers."
While I'm psyched about the fact that they went whole-hog and went GPL, there are a number of commercial Java Applications out there. The fact that they have this "Classpath Exemption" makes it sound more like the LGPL.But at any rate, it good that Java is now suitable for Linux.
Well, on a more practical note, this means that within a few months, I should be seeing a real, complete, working JRE sitting in the main repositories for Debian and Ubuntu. Sweet. We no longer have to go and fetch it ourselves or experiment with incomplete toolkits.
For the ideologues, knowing that there's one less piece of non-free software on your system is a real comfort. For me, personally, all that apparently remains are ATI drivers and Flash Player.
Yay!
~ C.
I don't think the Mono folks are rejoicing ;)
With this step, SUN has became the largest commercial contributor to the free and open source software pool. OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, now JAVA - well, kudos!
to post a link to a forked java
I work for a LARGE government contractor and have had a hard time getting management to realize Open Source in general and the GPL in particular aren't bad for business. Open source here has the same connotation as red communism. Can't get many of them to stop calling it freeware. With Sun making Java GPL they won't have the choice of sticking with that attitude anymore. Many of our existing projects use Java already!
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
And patent-wise? I mean for non-Novell customers, obviously.
Some more articles I have found, with some substance to them:
InfoQ, also mentions Glassfish.
eWeek.
There is also going to be a official webcast about this by Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green 9.30 a.m. PT.
In related news, apparently Project Looking Glass, the 3d desktop, is likely to be included in the Ubuntu Feisty release.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
If you choose mono, you choose an indirect control of microsoft all over your code. Good luck & god speed.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Now Stallman can drink coffee again
//WR
I love how easily you just shrug off that number.
Java is an embeddable language at the hardware level. So-called "Java chips" provide a very real platform for deployment on handheld devices. It's easier to develop applets in Java than in, say, C, since Java is higher-level. The fact that there is low-level support for such a high-level language makes it popular with cell phone developers.
Your point of Python is a good one. After all, Python is high-level, intelligent, and permits object-oriented development. It's my favorite, and I'm writing a few programs in it right now. However, Java still has a few advantages. First, it's ported more places, the most obvious off the top of my head being that Java's Mac OS X GUIs are far more robust and less buggy than Python's. Second, it's compiled and then byte-interpreted, giving it a fairly good speed compared to Python's interpretation. Python also has structures that, while easier to read, definitely don't execute as fast. (I do concede, however, that Java is no speed demon.)
Also, Java is embeddable as a web applet. Only a few other languages can do that. You can't exactly drag'n'drop a Python application into a web browser, hook it up to a frame, and project it to the world.
Of course, since this is Slashdot, I'll finish up with a low-blow bit of rhetoric. If Python is superior to Java, then why is the leading Bittorrent client, Azureus, written in Java if the original Bittorrent client was written in Python?
~ C.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6134584.html?ta g=zdfd.newsfeed
Java Standard Edition libraries will be licensed with GPL2 + Classpath Exception which permits linking with non-GPL applications. So there isn't any problem if you don't want to use GPL compatible license for your Java SE programs, you can still use and distribute GPL Java with it.
Well, it is not so simple, Java 10 years ago was nothing in comparation with Java today (I wouldn't actually call it usefull). Also, there was all that MS J++ fiasco, then a patent ligitation and deal MS and Sun had two years ago....lots of stuff happened, and it is really hard to tell how would things played out if Sun OSed Java 10 (or even 5) years ago.
I personally think timing is great. Java6 is a great piece of software, lets start from that point and see if we can make it better.
... welcome our new Duke overlord.
I have quoted two soundbites on my blog from videos that will be shown at the announcement tomorrow (the quotes are from the information that was (I believe) given to the press.
I've seen the video shorts (well some of them) that will be shown at the announcement. I think some folks will be surprised. RMS also makes reference to the java trap.
Tp.
You've been able to do that for years - just not under an Open Source licence. Sun have provided the entire JDK source (including the VM code) under their own Sun Community Source Licence (see http://www.sun.com/software/communitysource/j2se/
You need a bunch of binaries to get it bootstrapped (i.e. it requires Java to build Java) but the result is entirely compiled from the source you can get from the above site.
GPLing it is a change of licence terms, not a change in the actual availability of the source.
Python is also compiled and byte interpreted. It is certainly not interpreted in the same fashion as a shell script. Python even keeps the bytecode versions around and wil use them later to save recompilation. Any speed difference betwen the 2 will not be due to interpreation.
It is likely that Java will be a bit faster because there has been more resources thrown at and therefore more people able to do optimisation.
However, the big reason is that Python is a dynamic language (similar to Perl) and the compiler cannot make the same optimisations that a more staic language, such as Java and C can. It also tends to mean an extra layer of pointer redirection (hidden behind the scenes). When you have the ability to tie ('tie' is the Perl-speak way of talking about this - not sure if they use another word in Python) variable to external resources, you can't take any chances even with consecutive reads of the same variable. This all adds time.
As you say, you last shot is a low blow. Just because something is 'leading' does not make it the best - is Windows the best OS or IE the best browser? Maybe, maybe not - but I htink on Slashdot we'd agree there is more to it than just 'leading'. I've not used either client, but maybe Azureus is simply a better program with a better interface, maybe it is more widely available for different platforms? I have no idea - but it says nothing about the relative merits of the 2 languages as such.
That's like saying if you code C++, Bjarne Stroustrup has indirect control over your code. It's a ridiculous argument and the reason it gets any weight here at Slashdot is because it plays into that "Star Wars" mythology of the battle between good (FLOSS) and evil (Microsoft). And I'm sorry to say this but Star Wars isn't real.
Second, it's compiled and then byte-interpreted, giving it a fairly good speed compared to Python's interpretation.
Python is bytecode-compiled also, although to be fair I believe Python's bytecode is substantially higher level than Java bytecode. There is also a native-code just-in-time compiler (psyco) for x86 platforms that works reasonably well.
IMO, the main problem with Python, performance-wise, is that a variety of operations it supports are defined by the commonly-accepted understanding of the language to be atomic. This includes modifying lists and dictionaries. Because of this, these structures must have all accesses synchronised, which the standard Python implementation achieves by only allowing one thread to execute at once. I don't think I need to point out how horrible this is for scalability to multiprocessor systems.
Richard Stallman discussed this in a Nov 1st interview. I've put a transcript online.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
If Python is superior to Java, then why is the leading Bittorrent client, Azureus, written in Java
I don't know but it may be connected with why it's also a buggy, slow, memory-hogging piece of shit that crashes or just goes ape-shit crazy on a regular basis. I have a theory that this is actually caused by Java's garbage collection agent trying to delete the whole of the program's code on the grounds that it clearly is garbage.
GPL does not prevent forking (and some forks will develop due to $$$)but if the forker abides by the GPL he has to publish his code for the forks, so Sun could have incorporated those changes making Sun java compatible with MS-J.
Not necessarily:
1. GPL doesn't require patent licenses to be granted.
2. Most of the modifications MS made to their Java implementation wouldn't have worked for Sun because they were heavily dependent on features of Windows that aren't present on any other OS. Sun could've easily reimplemented compatible extensions to Java if the only issue was access to MS's code. They didn't because doing so would have violated the spirit of Java as a cross-platform language.
I wonder what is going to happen to these three projects?
GCJ will survive because it provides a facility that doesn't exist in the standard JDK (i.e., ahead-of-time compilation).
Kaffe will survive because it's BSD licensed.
Classpath will initially try to survive by copying large amounts of original Java code into itself, but I suspect will eventually become irrelevant as patches for classpath-using applications become available to allow them to use the original Java class library.
Let's hope now Java integrates all the good features of C#, like true generics.
That's easier said than done. A stable binary platform is important to the success of Java, and I suspect implementations of this kind of thing (of which there will be multiple) will result in a forked, fragmented platform with multiple implementations incompatible of interoperating with each other. Then an official Java distribution will pick up new features at probably only slightly faster rates than the current one, and the best of the features will be backported. We'll see slightly accelerated improvements in "official" Java because of the interest, but nothing dramatic, is my guess.
Java is NOT strictly interpreted language. HotSpot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot) mechanism dynamically compiles bytecode into machine code.
In theory, Python has Psyco that can do JIT-compiling, but in practice dynamic nature of Python prevents most of optimizations.
> Just think if Sun had done this in the 90s. There would never have been a GTK/Qt appliactions split because all software would have been written in Java.
Oh thank God they didn't open source it in the 90's!
...these aren't my real teeth.
Debain wanted to distribute their own patched version of Firefox, the Mozilla people didn't want to get blamed for all the bugs introduced by Debian, the name change was the way to resolve that conflict.
My own sympathy goes unreservedly to Mozilla, as a software developer I know what a total pain Debian is to deal with.
I think you misunderstood what I wrote. There are no patent problems with java, simply because SUN chose to license it under the GPL. Java is copyrighted by SUN, and it has a large IP portfolio over java technologies (lots of patents). As soon as they switched over to GPL, they immediately granted free use of these patents to every programmer who builds on java and distributes his code under the GPL. With SUN's choice, there are no longer any patent issues with java. Now contrast this with the deal Novell stuck with Microsoft, that guarantees a 5 year revocable (!) protective covenant for novell customers (and novell customers alone, according to SteveB himself) alone. The difference is HUGE! Of course, the details of the deal are not known - there may or may not be MS IP in Mono. Saying that there are is simply FUD, but than, Microsoft and Novell agreed not to sue each other's customers for patent infringement... which reinforces the perception that there might be patents. And which is the most likely candidate from the software stack distributed by Novell? The Linux kernel? KDE? Apart from perhaps Samba, Mono is the most likely candidate for patent infringement ... I think that is why Perens warns against it. But still, I must emphasize, that this is just my speculation. Don't take it too seriously (my original post was sarcastic, but ./ removed the evil-comment tags). One thing is certain: since SUN decided to distribute java under the GPL, as far as patents goes, it become safe. This cannot be said of Mono, even though you cannot claim the opposite either with absolute certainty... You see what meant now?
That it was all written using Visual Basic.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
That answers your questions better than I could - but I recommend reading the entire blog post, it is rather interesting.
Anytime I startup a Java program I want to run and hide due to fear that the pages being swapped out to make room for it will crush me where I stand.
Maybe as open source software people will be able to look at it and ask *why* does it have to take up so much memory to do such simple jobs? Compare for example Azureus (in Java) to bittorrent (in Python).
I see a couple of benefits of the GPL, namely that my favourite distributions can now supply Java as a standard part of the distribution, and that I should probably now be able to easily get ports of Sun Java to platforms I want to use (whereas I was limited to IBM or an older port from Blackdown before)
Sun can still maintain control over "Sun Java", which is what most people will use. Sure, people could fork and deliver versions that break the tests you mention, but it is unlikely many people will use them. There are forks of most major GPL packages out there, but for the most part people stick with the main tree.
The other advantage the GPL has over the existing Sun licences is that many people are unable to look at or work with the code from Sun because their employer forbids them. GNU Classpath is an example of this in open source - cleanroom implementations only, no peeking at the Sun JDK source, and make sure you don't sign any NDA's on the way.
I meant suitable as a Linux compatible license. Now distributions can include the JDK without conflict. Personally, I find Java's performance, stability, security, and reliability to be just fine.
That's what you get for using Firefox 3. I had no problems using Firefox 2.
that Java on Debian will be as easy as "apt-get install java"
:-)
Close... More like: "apt-get install java java-doc java-common java-dev java-examples java-gnome libjava libjava-doc libjava-dev"
I felt a great disturbance in the slashdot, as if millions of "sun is the next redmond" trolls cried out in terror, and then vanished.
1. GPL doesn't require patent licenses to be granted.
Actually, it does. If Mircosoft didn't want to grant a patent license, they could not distribute it under the GPL. The funny twist is the one Microsoft pulled with Novell - what you need to make sure is the party distributing the code (Novell) isn't the same as the one holding the patent (Microsoft). They can't give Novell a patent license because that'd hold Novell to the GPL - instead they create a covenant saying they won't sue Novell for those patents. It's in essence a patent license without actually giving one. Mircosoft could have pulled exactly the same with a subsidiary "Microsoft Java, Inc." who'd happen to be in a covenant with Microsoft, Inc. to not get sued, but everyone else is.
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otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not
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distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this
License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you
may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent
license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by
all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then
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Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings