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Sun Completes Java Core Tech Open-Sourcing
MsManhattan writes "A year after announcing its plans, Sun Microsystems has made almost all of the core technology in Java available as open-source software under the GNU general public license version 2 (GPLv2). However, some of the code remains 'encumbered'; that is, Sun doesn't have sufficient rights to release it under GPLv2, and the company is requesting the open-source community's help in resolving these issues. Rich Sands, community marketing manager for OpenJDK community at Sun, would not say what percentage of Java's 6.5 million lines of code are encumbered, but explained that it is largely Java 2D graphics technology, such as font and graphics rasterizing."
(I posted this under the wrong story so I am copy pasting here....)
I think most people in the F/OSS community don't see the importance of Sun's actions in the last couple of years regarding the economic viability of F/OSS.
This is a company who opened sourced (or is open sourcing right now) a very large important and complex portfolio of it's software. It is also a company which is considered a major player in its field and a lot for these software products where successfully sold for big bucks in the past.
F/OSS takes a lot of criticism regarding it economic model which most businessmen see as non existent. If Sun can pull it through and improve its financial results after making such a big commitment to F/OSS software, only than will the F/OSS community will have a winner in their hands to show off in front of skeptics. This is not the same as Red Hat who made a business out of F/OSS but a company which is rejecting the old ways of closed source and is taking a big gamble that F/OSS is not only the right thing to do morally, but that it can also become a better business model than closed source software.
OpenSolaris is open source and *free software* minus a few encumbered portions, just like Java. So I'm uncertain as to what you are referring to.
Sun contributes a lot to Open Source and produces very interesting hardware. Thanks for Java, thanks for OOo (which I find to be a huge pig but then I also find MS Office to be a mega pig), thanks for OpenSolaris... And thanks to RMS for the GPL. It's good to see Sun choosing the GPL (with exceptions) as their open source Java licence.
;) and some others done worse (*). This is a testimony to Java's quality as a third-generation OOPL (I'm not saying that third-generation language are the be-all end-all of programming nor that OO is the be-all end-all of programming, but simply that as an 3rd generation OOPL Java is very good).
Trolls are already in the thread saying that OOo is unusable and that (Open)Solaris is the most insecure Unix ever. The trolliest of them all even dare to say that Java is a failure... On this last point nobody should be mistaken: Java is a langage and a VM whose success is beyond any language author's wildest dreams.
As stated by James Gosling himself not long ago: it is basically impossible to do a financial transaction today without having Java involved at one point or another... And this is a Good Thing (TM) Why is the banking industry so in love with Java? The bullet-proof JVM and portability of the languages. Not a single language before Java had ever offered such an incredibly good VM running on so many different hardware/software configurations.
There are countries where tens of millions of people are carrying "Java SmartCards" on them. More than 90% of all cellphones sold worldwide have a J2ME VM (agreed: not Java's most glorious example, but nearly 20% of all games sold worldwide are little Java games for cellphones sold to casual gamers... Food for thought to anyone dismissing J2ME).
Java is a success that has grown beyond anyone's wildest imagination and it just keeps getting better and better. I was an very early Java believer (back in the days where it was really messy to do Java development on Linux) and back in the days there were many misconceptions regarding Java. Nowadays it's simply unexcusable to try to deny that Java is a huge success. Like COBOL today, Java will still be the technology making the real-world work in decades (insert your lame jokes about COBOL here... I personally laugh everytime some COBOL is involved when you're making a real-world transaction [and, yup, I've done COBOL programming]).
Note that (contrarily to C#/.Net) "Java the language" and "Java the VM" have been chosen because they were very impressive technologies, not because the company creating them had a monopoly on a certain market. C# is a copy (7 years later or so) of "Java the language", with some things done better (thankfully, 7 years later, that they got some things right
Thanks Sun.
(*) C# has then been basically forced down the throats of programmers locked in the MS monopoly. If C# hadn't Microsoft's illegally maintained monopoly (the "illegally maintained monopoly" is a fact, checks your facts if you disagree) backing it wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today.