Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sun Releases First GPLed Java Source

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the beginning-of-an-era dept.

An anonymous reader writes "You can now get GPLed JVM sources from Sun. Everyone seemed to be expecting the desktop version (J2SE) but J2ME has been released first. It looks to be buildable for Linux x86, MIPS, and ARM platforms. Sun now calls it 'phoneME.' Enjoy."

3 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Linux is great and all by IversenX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You are really, really, really comparing apples to oranges here.

    Mono is comparable, yes.

    However, Qt, GTK and wxWidgets are all just GUI toolkits! You still need a programming
    language (Pascal, C++, Perl, even Java(!)) to use these. Installation will be easier,
    though. I'm personally looking forward to "apt-get install sun-java" or somesuch.

    Also, it will soon (when J2SE comes out) be possible to write better integration with existing
    apps, such as better (faster, more modern) browser applet plugins. That, I'm looking
    forward to.

    (Oh, and now that the sources aer GPLed, it should be really easy to make this thing run on *BSD if it doesn't already)

    --
    With great numbers come great responsibility!
  2. Re:Congratulations to Sun and Thank You. by tygerstripes · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Just wanted to say "hear hear". It took 20 posts before somebody actually had the decency to say Thank-you-this-is-a-good-thing, most of those 20 straying into completely niche related topics. I'm not saying they weren't all relevant or interesting points, but thanks for actually saying thanks.

    As far as I'm concerned: the short-term impact of this will be decent as people start getting their teeth into the source (as they have done since November), but the long-term impact will be fucking huge. I don't have a lot of personal experience, but this announcement combined with the fact that so many CS degrees start with OOP by teaching in Java means that people will routinely be encouraged to appreciate the power of FOSS from the start, before they get used to the limitations that its absence imposes.

    To reiterate: This-Is-A-Good-Thing.

    --
    Meta will eat itself
  3. Thank you Sun by wikinerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I am very happy that Sun Microsystems open sourced its Java and OpenSolaris products. If I buy my own server hardware, I will certainly prefer Sun. Contrast this with Microsoft, which is known for its Embrace-Extend-and-Extinguish practices, its preference to its own shared source licences for the very few lines of code that they ever made public, their aggressive hiring of some open-source people (why? to silence them with dollars?), and shadowy agreements with GNU/Linux vendors. Sun initially tried to use CDDL, but now took a bold step by adopting GPL and releasing actual, useful, working code under it. This means that Sun has open-minded people in its management.