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."

Comments

Not much of a surprise.

[AKAImBatman]

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.

In case anyone is wondering, this isn't much of a surprise to the Java community. When Sun was creating the latest and greatest Java libraries, they designed the APIs themselves to be generic. However, Sun generally licensed the underlying libraries for their reference implementation rather than developing them in-house. In the case of the Java2D APIs, they used code from Kodak to do all the fancy 2D rasterizations and transformations. This is why many Java coders thought that Sun's reference implementation would never be Open Sourced. (Happy to be wrong, BTW.)

That code by itself could probably be replaced with a modern 2D rasterizer (similar to the types found in SVG and Canvas implementations), but it would need to be heavily overhauled to backport the VolatileImage support added in Java 1.4. (Basically, the JVM is able to manage the video card memory to store images for faster rendering and backbuffering.) I'm thinking that something OpenGL-based would be the best bet.

However, that's not the only major library used. JavaSound also uses Dolby Headspace to render sound. It barely uses a fraction of the library's capabilities, but it would still need to be replaced. I don't know what was used for cryptography, but that would be replacable with a library like Bouncy Castle.

All in all, the final code shouldn't be too hard to replace as long as Open Source equivalents can be found. However, these areas *do* require significant expertise, so don't expect that joe random can jump in the code and make it happen.

Re:Not much of a surprise.

[AchiIIe]

I would love to help myself
As a longtime java developer, and advocate of the open source java, I think it's time to put my time where my mouth is. Albeit a few questions:
* Where is the effort being organised
* Is there a list of the methods that need to be reimplemented?
* Have I been tainted -- I've seen java code before, If I reimplement something and it might look like the previous code, how do I guard against this?
* Can we make java better?

Re:Serious question: Java, Apache 2, and GPLv2

[mhall119]

I'm giving up mod points on this article, but given the amount of misinformation you're getting, its better that I post a reply.

Sun isn't using GPLv2, they are using GPLv2 + the Classpath exception. This is a modification to the GPLv2 pioneered by the GNU Classpath project. It basically makes Java's code GPL, but doesn't require code running on the JVM, or using the J2SE libraries, to be GPLv2 complaint.

Links here:
http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/faq.js p#g5
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t84256.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception

The Sun Experiment

[krelian]

(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.

Re:SUN and GPL

[TheRaven64]

Yeah, Sun sucks. They haven't contributed anything worthwhile to the community. Well, except OpenOffice. And that whole NFS thing. Oh, and OpenSolaris. Well, and Java now...

I stand by companies like IBM. I'm running Open Source AIX here right now. Oh, wait...