Sun Releases First GPLed Java Source

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."

Comments

And if you want to play with it now... MIDPath

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like this was released back in November with the full Java GPL announcement according to the official announcement.

And people already started hacking it and combining it with all kinds of interesting existing free java projects to product MIDPath

Seems the GNU Classpath, Kaffe, GCJ, etc projects really want to Collaborate and work together with Sun according to their latest release notes. 2007 might be a pretty interesting year for Java and GNU/Linux (and mobile devices!)

Re:And if you want to play with it now... MIDPath

[Chief Camel Breeder]

"Seems the GNU Classpath, Kaffe, GCJ, etc projects really want to Collaborate [wildebeest.org] and work together [wildebeest.org] with Sun according to their latest release notes [gnu.org]. 2007 might be a pretty interesting year for Java and GNU/Linux (and mobile devices!)"

If SUN Java is GPL'd, why would anybody carry on with an alternative version? Do they really thing that they can do better than SUN? Usually they do worse.

Kaffe in particular has been a problem for my project because it lacks some of the library classes that are an assumed part of the platform. Kaffe with SUN's libraries would be much better for us. However, I've yet to see evidence that Kaffe with complete libraries would be better than SUN's own JVM.

The only reasons for continuing that I can see (other than inertia and possibly hubris) are (a) to have alternate reference implementations for bug comparisons (is it really worth the effort); (b) in case SUN change their mind and close the source again (unlikely, and one can always fork the last free version); (c) in case SUN discontinue their own Java product. Maintaining their own JVM must cost SUN billions and doesn't generate revenue directly. Could they be planning to cease development?

Congratulations to Sun and Thank You.

[dwalsh]

Congratulations to the Sun people who have made this a reality.

They are freeing up the crown jewels, and the significance of that fact should not be underestimated. Free as in 'gratis' and free as in 'libre'.

I am not a Sun employee, but I am a Java dev., and I would like to remind people of Sun's contributions to open source over the years. While the press communications of executives have muddied the waters, Sun have done more in the past for open source than a certain "Think Free" company. That company pressed for open sourcing Java and then bitched about the choice of the GPL.

I would love to see the source to Websphere (not the Geronimo 'Websphere' product, but the real deal).

... for laughs if nothing else.

Re:Its 7:00 AM and its slashdotted

[Curtman]

most people who go to slashdot are in the US

Says who? Show me something that says more than 50% of Slashdot visitors are in the U.S. please.

see how it says slashdot.org and not slashdot.eu

And how do you figure .org is exclusive to the U.S. ?

Something real good I guess!

[freakxx]

I dont have much idea of licensing issues associated with JAVA and GPL but I think it is going to change the things drastically. I guess all the difficulties in making JAVA work properly on a system is only because the open-source vendors can't implement JAVA so freely in contrast with other real open-source things like mono... I hope the JAVA will come properly installed on systems from now onwards and one doesn't need to dig around sun's website to download binaries and then follow some tutorial on internet to set the variables appropriately !

Re:Linux is great and all

[AKAImBatman]

And I also want this running on the Super Nintendo this time tomorrow, *snap *snap

To be serious for a moment, I honestly hope that this encourages ports to the Wii, XBox 360, and PS3. Java is an extremely capable game programming language at this point, and could potentially save programmers a great deal of development and debugging time. In fact, the only thing that's been holding developers back from using Java is that it doesn't port to the major consoles. If that were to change...

Re:Mono is not compareanble either

[Creepy]

I'm stuck in the "write once, test everywhere" world of Java. It's amazing how little things slip through the cracks on some platforms. One bug I hit just last week involving focus listeners on a popup window (dialog) was reported against Windows, fixed in Windows and HP-UX, but never tested or fixed on Solaris and Linux until a bug was written against those platforms. You'd think something like that would get heavy testing, but it still slips into production code.

On the plus side, at least java mostly runs on those systems, which is more than I can say about .NET (mono might be available, but I doubt I can convince anyone to use it in a production enterprise environment, even if it were good). We do use .NET on our "Windows initiative," but I'm mostly out of the loop on that one.

Re:Linux is great and all

[AKAImBatman]

Porting the full Sun Java to the PS3 would be great, but for real development you'd need Sony (or NVidia)'s help getting the OpenGL acceleration working.

More precisely, you'd just need the development kit. (Which, granted, is a pretty exclusive club.) Sony already support the micro version of OpenGL, so it shouldn't prove too difficult to port JOGL or LWJGL. Of course, my understanding is that a lot of the graphics programmers develop their own drivers for the consoles. So that part would probably remain unchanged, but with Java thunks. (Unless someone ports Java to the GPU, that is...)

I play Wurm Online, a fairly involved persistent online fantasy simulator which runs in Java and JOGL and games like it could easily be made to work on the PS3 with PS3Linux, if the OpenGL acceleration were available.

In theory, it should already run on PS3 Linux; albeit a bit slow. I'm thinking more along the lines of running the game directly from a game disc.

BTW, Markus has already submitted his 4K entry for this year. Looks like he decided to do a Zuma clone this time around. :)

Re:Mono is not compareanble either

[GrueMoon]

Well, gee, thanks for making my point.

>For starters, it seems, for our dev team at least, anything can be done in the Java world if you throw enough $$ at a "platform" or "Framework"...

>They also like to over develop stuff...

>Most likely a poorly written ap causing some memory buffer to overflow...

>...but I think it has long gone the way of PHP, where most developers have gotten lazy and sloppy.

Re:.NET and Java in the enterprise

[shutdown -p now]

Having said that, .NET is probably the single best GUI implementation framework I've seen yet (although that may be damning it with faint praise)

You mean the one (WinForms) that still doesn't have proper layouts, and until version 2.0 didn't have owner-drawn listviews? Or the one (WPF) which is so ugly it beats Swing in Java 1.4 (I'd rather look at non-smoothed fonts then suffer the pain of catching a glimpse of what WPF font smoothing does)?

Personally, I rather find Swing to be one of the best, if not the best, in terms of properly designed API. Its main problem was ugliness and weird look, but Java 6 by and large fixed it, and MS shoot itself in the foot by making WPF - supposedly the next-generation Windows GUI API - look ugly.