Sun to Fully Open Source Java

Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf brings news that Sun Microsystems will be removing the last restrictions on Java to make it completely open source. Sun wants Java to be easily available for use in Linux distributions. We've discussed the steps Sun has taken to open-source Java over the past couple years. From Yahoo! News: "'We've been engaging with the open-source community for Java to finish off the OpenJDK project, and the specific thing that we've been working on with them is clearing the last bits that we didn't have the rights,' to distribute, Sands said. 'Over the past year, we have pretty much removed most of those encumbrances.' Work still needs to be done to offer the Java sound engine and SNMP code via open source; that effort is expected to be completed this year. Developers, though, may be able to proceed without a component like the sound engine, Sands said.

Comments

Better late than early

[Just Some Guy]

Kudos to Sun for waiting so long to open source it. Had it been FOSS back when my company was trying to decide what language to standardize on, we might have picked it instead of Python. Thanks!

Re:Better late than early

[Uncle Focker]

They've open sourced everything they had rights to do long ago. The only parts they didn't was due to stuff they had licensed and had no right to release the source code for. Seriously, how dare they not violate their contracts so that you could get code they had no right to release!

Re:Better late than early

[abigor]

He was implying that it would have been a big mistake to have chosen Java, and that in fact Sun did them a huge favour by making them choose a better language/framework instead. Of course, now that I've had to explain it, it's not funny anymore.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah my bad. I misread the post.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

It was lame anyway, unless his implication was their review process sucked and they would have chosen the second best option.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, lucky you. Now you can stay with a language that will never support concurrent threads correctly and will always be confused about what a buffer is so that it will always have mediocre support for high performance (numerical) computing.

I had big hopes for Python when they said they were going to fix things in Python 3000, but from what I can see, they're just going to break existing applications without actually improving the fundamentals...

Re:Better late than early

[Just Some Guy]

They've open sourced everything they had rights to do long ago. The only parts they didn't was due to stuff they had licensed and had no right to release the source code for. Seriously, how dare they not violate their contracts so that you could get code they had no right to release!

We were looking for something cross-platform, and at that time Java was every bit as proprietary as VB and other close dead-end languages. I understand why Java wasn't FOSS at that time, but that still made it ineligible as a serious contender for long-term development. Had Sun made Java's openness a goal a lot sooner, many companies (including mine) might have chosen it over whatever else they decided upon.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

You chose your language based solely on the license, rather than how well it supported your development tasks?

Bullshit.

Re:Better late than early

[Spasemunki]

I suspect the poster is alluding to the fact that Sun's decision not to make Java more open from the beginning cost them a lot of position in the market. Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing, and so kept the language under their tight control to prevent it being forked by competitors or used in manners that they didn't approve of. The result was that because of 1) objections to Sun's control of the language, and 2) Sun's priorities in terms of support for certain platforms and not others, Java lost a lot of ground in the back-end space to Python, Ruby, and others, and the space occupied by the applet was essentially devoured by Ajax. Sun was envisioning Java as having a ubiquity in the application space to rival that of C in the systems space, but it hasn't really reached that potential. The decision to push for a closed, tightly controlled language early on is a good part of what caused that.

Re:Better late than early

[Just Some Guy]

You chose your language based solely on the license, rather than how well it supported your development tasks?

You say that as though there's a difference. We were migrating from a legacy codebase in Visual FoxPro, and learned well the lessons against using sole-provider solutions. The absolute last thing we were willing to do was throw ourselves again to the mercy of someone else's whims. With Python, and now Java, we get to keep some of that control.

Re:Better late than early

[bigstrat2003]

There's a HUGE fucking difference. While the ability to maintain something indefinitely (ie, the thing open-source brings to the table) may be a factor, it's far from the only one. And for my money, it should be dead last on the list of things to consider when choosing a language, including "Did the quarter come up heads or tails?".

Re:Better late than early

[ARRG.ch]

Wait, what ? Both are Turing complete, I can't see your point.

Re:Better late than early

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Who is this "we"? Certainly not the real world. Hopefully by "we" you mean your small group of still-in-college developers that are in for a rude awakening when you hit the real world.

By "we" he probably means "a group of knowledgeable developers who are lucky enough to be employed somewhere that they can choose the best tool for the task instead of having to go with whatever the PHB thinks is the hot buzzword this week." It's very true that the "real world" can be a difficult place, but people with attitudes like yours don't help make it any better. Fortunately, there are businesses where management knows enough to get the hell out of the way and let the developers make their own decisions on which tools to use.

Re:Better late than early

[mortonda]

If Java is the answer, you're asking the wrong questions.

Re:Better late than early

[fm6]

Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing, and so kept the language under their tight control to prevent it being forked by competitors or used in manners that they didn't approve of. That's the official story, and it's true as far as it goes. But it's not the whole truth.

The big problem has been Sun's corporate mindset. Until recently, key decision makers at Sun, both on the business side and the R&D site, seriously believed that they were smarter than everybody else, and had no need to listen to anybody else's ideas. That's why Sun stuck with SPARC processors so very long after it became obvious that commodity processors were the future — SPARC architecture is superior to x86, end of discussion. It's also why Sun's first attempt to move to commodity systems (by spending $2 billion for Cobalt Networks) was a total disaster: the Cobalt people couldn't get any respect from the rest of Sun, and quickly moved on. I can think of many other examples.

I was a contractor at Sun/JavaSoft in '98, and saw this attitude all over the place. In some cases, I couldn't get access to the FrameMaker source for key specifications because the spec owners feared "forked" copies of the specs!

The really sad thing is that many of these people were every bit as smart as they themselves thought they were. But their raw intelligence was often wasted, because you need a certain willingness to collaborate to create a real product.

I recently came back to Sun as a regular employee. I like to think this intellectual arrogance is no longer a major problem here. Part of this is the example set by current upper management, which seems to understand the problems I describe. But the big reason: most of the my-way-or-the-highway geniuses have been hired away by Google.

Re:Better late than early

[xiaomai]

Honestly, it wasn't that funny to begin with (and I don't even like java).

Re:Better late than early

[RiotingPacifist]

Funny, last time i said Java wasn't fully open source, i got modded -1
Dear moderators, i would like to take this opertunity to perform a little victory rickroll as seen here

For the record OO, also has a clause that stops it being fully GPL, thats why neo office code cant be used, because sun want to take open source contributions and use them in their proprietary version of open office

Go on mod me down, it will only make me stronger

Re:Better late than early

[Sloppy]

While the ability to maintain something indefinitely (ie, the thing open-source brings to the table) may be a factor, it's far from the only one. And for my money, it should be dead last on the list of things to consider when choosing a language

Dead last?! Spoken like someone who has never been fucked over. Just wait 'til a proprietary compiler/runtimelibrary vendor tells you, "No, we're not ever fixing that. And you can't fix it, either." It's even better when you have to tell the same thing to your client.

Sympathies to the FoxPro guy. I was once a Clipper guy. I don't know whether the availability of maintenance is number 1 or 2 on my list, but it's waaay up there. Never again. Never fucking again will I have that kind of shit in my life. I'll get out of IT and flip burgers for a living, before I write another line of code that has miserably crippled and hopelessly unmaintainable dependencies.

Re:Better late than early

[Just Some Guy]

Liar. You have to pay per instance of VisualBasic to even run the compiler. Java's tools (while not as good IDE-wise as VB) have always been available with a $free$ license.

Who cares? We're a company, not a bunch of broke kids, and don't have problems spending money if we need to. "Free as in speech" is much more important to us than "free as in beer", even though the lack of price tag is a nice bonus.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense, but you sound like you've been in this industry for about one year.

Re:Better late than early

[fbjon]

If those people moved to Google, can we then expect Google to become mired in similar internal issues?

Re:Better late than early

[Just Some Guy]

That is exactly how we feel about it. FoxPro certainly isn't my choice of development environments, but our old code runs - and runs well. The only reason we're migrating away is that it's officially a dead language, and it's crazy to keep developing on something whose owner has said has no future.

So that's how we ended up on Python. Java probably would have done most of the same stuff, and it'd probably be easier to find Java programmers where I live, but we weren't going to fall sucker to that problem again.

Re:Better late than early

[SirLurksAlot]

Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing

And rightly so considering the last 13 or so years of development in the industry.

Java lost a lot of ground in the back-end space to Python, Ruby, and others

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this remark is probably only true regarding FOSS projects. Looking at this statement from a commercial development point of view is another ballgame entirely.

Job search hits from Dice.com

• Java: 15786 jobs
• Python: 1395 jobs
• Ruby: 757 jobs
• C/C++ 6283 jobs

Lets be honest, the industry as it currently stands runs on Java and .NET. This is not to say that OSS and the languages mentioned above are not gaining ground quickly, but I think its important to keep a historical perspective regarding the status of Java. Java really was/is the Next Big Thing, and it will almost certainly become the next COBOL in terms of the amount of code which will need to be maintained decades from now.

Re:Better late than early

[Just Some Guy]

Thanks, and yes, that's pretty much what my company's like. My boss likes to be included in such decisions because it's ultimately his responsibility if we really screw up, but I've never once been overruled when I had solid reasons for my choice. In general, he just likes the nice toys we give him (internal Jabber server, spam-free email, PostgreSQL, etc.) and trusts us when we want to use something cool.

Re:Better late than early

[msobkow]

Far from it. Even the current efforts make no attempt to open source the J2EE core, which is really the "meat and potatoes" of Java as far as most shops are concerned. Fortunately we've got JBoss to tackle that aspect of OSS Java environments.

I also don't see any mention of open sourcing Java ME, which would be appealing for cell phones and other embedded systems. Still, I guess Sun has to earn something for all the work that went into Java.

Re:Better late than early

[msobkow]

Oops. Forgot about "Glassfish". My bad.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I cant stand JAVA; therefore, I found the comment pretty funny.

Re:Better late than early

[petermgreen]

Long ago is a bit of an exaggeration, the first code drop was less than two years ago and the first drop of the majority of the code

Sun was talking about open sourcing java for many years, but it was only fairly recently (december 2006) that they actually annouced the license they planned to use and gave us a little taste of code (not that said code was much use on it's own). and promised all of the JDK "except for a few components that Sun does not have the right to publish in source form under the GPL" would be released by march of the next year

Then when it came we discovered that those few components included serveral major parts of the graphics subsystem. Progress to getting high quality replacements for those components and getting them into the official codebase has been rather slow and is still not complete.

Also it was only last febuary that they opensourced anything from the java6 codebase, before that everything they released was from the java 7 alpha codebase, hardly ideal for production use (though a couple of linux distros shipped the code anyway because they considered it better than nothin).

This article doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know already.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

dionysius studios, Our experience on the Internet dates back to 1987?

LOL! Must be writing about Compuserve!
BM

Re:Better late than early

[maxume]

I'm not sure Google expects all of their employees to do stuff. Or, maybe I should say, sometimes it seems like it. They haven't released a whole lot of stuff for a company with 10,000+ of the best and brightest. They sell a lot of ads though.

Re:Better late than early

[drolli]

and at that time Java was every bit as proprietary as VB and other close dead-end languages. No. The documentation of the VM was available, so you could program your own. See kaffe, see gcj etc.
You could develop and run java progeam without Sun's machine and be compatible with it. I can't say that this is true for VB.

Re:Better late than early

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

All true. Still, I think in retrospect, they must be a little disappointed in the lack of desktop applications written in the language.

Re:Better late than early

[domatic]

For the record OO, also has a clause that stops it being fully GPL, thats why neo office code cant be used

One part of this I don't understand and the other part isn't factual. If OO wasn't "fully GPL" then NeoOffice wouldn't exist in the first place. It is true that Sun only accepts contributions if the copyright is turned over to them but that in no way un-GPL's the software.

As for NeoOffice, they contribute or at least attempt to contribute bugfixes under Sun's terms because bugs in the core OO code affect them too. But there is a political/personality problem that cause the OO devs to ignore the NeoOffice guys. For instance, the X11 OO on OS X was unable to open files on a network share. The NeoOffice guys had this problem fixed for two years before it was fixed in OO and had to keep forward porting the fix because NeoOffice is Politically Incorrect over in OO land.

Re:Better late than early

[anomalous cohort]

Java lost a lot of ground in the back-end space to Python, Ruby

Uh, huh. A quick reality check over at dice shows number of jobs for java = 15831, number of jobs for python = 1396, number of jobs for ruby = 759. The same search over at Monster shows number of jobs for java > 5000, number of jobs for python = 1256, number of jobs for ruby = 663.

tight control to prevent it being forked by competitors or used in manners that they didn't approve of

Did we forget about this?

Re:Better late than early

[pimpimpim]

Ok, since you apparently have faith in them keeping you employed for a while, do you think the revenue of Sun still has the possiblity to grow? I really like the very open way Sun is going at the moment, but I do fear that it might not bring any revenue. Dell can now install Solaris on their servers, for example, but how will that help Sun? Do they have anything left except good but pricy hardware?

Re:Better late than early

[RiotingPacifist]

However, OpenOffice.org requires a copyright assignment for contributions to the main code base; this allows Sun to create proprietary versions of the software (notably StarOffice). NeoOffice chooses not to assign their code to Sun; this prevents NeoOffice code from being used in official OpenOffice.org versions. Instead, NeoOffice is released only under the GPL (this is allowed by the LGPL), which ensures that any software based on it remains free. As the NeoOffice guys didnt want thier code going into a proprietary version of the software, they didnt sign a clause in OO that allows it to be used in StarOffice. In the contects of the original thread, i was basically saying that Sun are happy to use GPL to get code, but theyre want to retain control of the code so that they can release non-opensource versions. There license is effectively a BSD lisence with a clause stopping anybody else using it for comercial products, but they would rather call it GPL.

Re:Better late than early

[Kent Recal]

Yep, they have amazing hardware at *excellent* prices, too.
I don't give a damn for solaris or any sun software but their xfire series
is the best bang for buck you can buy these days.

Re:Better late than early

[aztektum]

Agreed. We just got bit by that shit upgrading to Viz Studio 2008. Some functions in a library became deprecated and things in new builds were not working. On the plus side, it was stuff that had been built in for internal dev purposes, but apparently they don't have access to change the library. Instead certain devs get to redo their stuff.

I can see the point that a license alone should not dictate the tools used, however on the flipside, is there really a reason NOT to use an open language? C/C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, (now) Java, etc etc etc... It's not like these languages are fresh from the lab. Each is a bit more than "time tested".

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, moral of the story and all, you know? This is what you get for listening to your marketers.

I agree with thread starter. I've been a part of the decision process for dozens of software projects over the years when we were playing "pin the language on the project". We'd go with Python, C, Perl, PHP, Javascript, any damned thing just to avoid being tied to a proprietary language, library, or anything.

Quite frankly, it should be a law: nobody is ALLOWED to even CONSIDER making money off a language. Make money off the software you make with that language, yes. I have dealt with about 50 languages and variances in my time. The lousiest free(dom) language kicks the ass of the greatest proprietary language, every single time.

Been that way since home-brew BASIC.

Re:Better late than early

[Tablizer]

and the space occupied by the applet was essentially devoured by Ajax.

I have to disagree. Ajax GUI's still suck. Java GUI's are tolerable and fairly stable. Maybe someday Ajax will catch up, or maybe MS will sabotage its JavaScript to prevent it.

Re:Better late than early

[zsau]

OT, but just to let you know, the word "till" is spelt like that, not "'til"; it's not a contraction. The word "until" in fact is derived from the word "till" with the prefix "un-" (obviously not using its English meaning of "not", but an old Norse meaning that was similar).

Re:Better late than early

[Tablizer]

# Java: 15786 jobs # Python: 1395 jobs # Ruby: 757 jobs

Maybe it takes 11.316 times as many Java developers to do what a single Pythor can do, eh?

Re:Better late than early

[AmaDaden]

Also don't forget this. "Tomcat started off as a servlet reference implementation by James Duncan Davidson, a software architect at Sun Microsystems. He later helped make the project open source and played a key role in its donation by Sun to the Apache Software Foundation." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tomcat) The JSP container that defined what a JSP container was got opened up early on.

Re:Better late than early

[ultranova]

Still, I think in retrospect, they must be a little disappointed in the lack of desktop applications written in the language.

Which is their own damn fault. Every new version has its own collection of Swing bugs to work around; my favorite one at the moment is a weird one which causes a component to somehow combine a redrawn version of itself with the old one, like the Opaque setting was falsely set to true (it isn't), resulting in garbled screen. I'm guessing it's caused by some overly aggressive optimization somewhere in the drawing code.

Fun fun fun.

Re:Better late than early

[Max Littlemore]

...we might have picked it instead of Python. Thanks!

Are you trying to start a religious war? Python's alright and all, but I wouldn't put Java and Python in the same category.

For one thing Python is dynamically typed and Java isn't and there are a lot of cases where I personally prefer the rigor of a language with strict typing. Or perhaps you're a bit confused between Java and JavaScript? A lot of people make that mistake.

Your comment is a funny troll, which is still a troll.

Re:Better late than early

[afabbro]

The funny thing is that of those 15,786 jobs, not one has any economic impact on Sun's bottom line. It's like the old joke - what do Bill Gates and Scott McNealy have in common? Neither can make a dime on Java.

My $BIG_FORTUNE_500_EMPLOYER uses a ton of Java...but I don't think Sun makes a dime on any of it. We certainly aren't using their IDE tools, nor running the code on Sun servers.

It's nice that Sun is open-sourcing Java. But it's also kind of funny/sad that only Sun would invent a hugely successful product, not make a dime on it, and yet keep it closed-sourced for 13 years.

Re:Better late than early

[mortonda]

That's not a troll. That's the truth.

Re:Better late than early

[hotfireball]

Job search hits from Dice.com

Java [dice.com]: 15786 jobs
Python: [dice.com] 1395 jobs
Ruby: [dice.com] 757 jobs
C/C++ [dice.com] 6283 jobs

BTW, same site says:
Excel: 10742 jobs
Coffee making: 22 jobs
Micromanagement: 96539 jobs
Yelling on Employees: 1 job (Junior Technolohist)

Re:Better late than early

[tonyr60]

Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing, and so kept the language under their tight control to prevent it being forked by competitors or used in manners that they didn't approve of. That's the official story, and it's true as far as it goes. But it's not the whole truth.

The big problem has been Sun's corporate mindset. Until recently, key decision makers at Sun, both on the business side and the R&D site, seriously believed that they were smarter than everybody else, and had no need to listen to anybody else's ideas. That's why Sun stuck with SPARC processors so very long after it became obvious that commodity processors were the future — Rigghhht, this suggests they have moved on from SPARC (to commodity processors). I don't think so, SPARC processors appear to be returning all the net revenue so far, based on the high margins those systems appear to be returning.

Re:Better late than early

[Dr.Ruud]

40 skilled and seasoned Perl developers can do better than a group of 1500 Java developers. (we do it every day)

Re:Better late than early

[tuomoks]

Just have to comment your comment. It is refreshing to see that Sun, on which I have worked since 80's and seen sometimes going this way and sometimes going that way, is getting back to where the good "engineering" is more important for business than the car salesman talk.
Sun is (has been) a weird company, they made some very good enhancements for computing and then retracted? Many times - want the manuals?
Now, I don't really like Java as a system, Java as a language is decent, but the number of API's, or in OO language the methods, is ridiculous. When I ask a developer how they would implement one thing they start putting down a lot of objects and methods when in reality it would need just a couple of "old fashioned" calls? Short and simple is forgotten in Java (and C++/C# is no better). Maybe just my ignorance but sometimes fixing the code gets to you when the developers have left the company and there is a mess.

Re:Better late than early

[dodobh]

Alternatively, the Ruby and Python programmers are 20/10 times as productive as the Java programmers, and you need fewer good programmers.

Re:Better late than early

[tkinnun0]

Is that how FSF operates when it comes to the GNU codebase?

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

If those people moved to Google, can we then expect Google to become mired in similar internal issues?

No, because this time we really ARE smarter than anybody else and DON'T NEED to listen to anybody else's ideas.

Re:Better late than early

[mattcasters]

No, it's because Java is a strongly typed language and as such suitable for enterprise work.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

"If those people moved to Google, can we then expect Google to become mired in similar internal issues?"

No, because these geniuses can attempt to prove their point on their on project time they are given. If they can't make it work then, then I suppose they'd have to tell themselves they weren't as smart as they thought they were, or they'd have to work harder. Motivation beyond money is a big win for a corporation such as Google.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

it wasn't that funny to begin with

That's why it has been modded insightful.

Re:Better late than early

[giafly]

Ditto and congratulations to Sun. Had Java been Open Source ten years ago, my company would be using Solaris or Linux + Java instead of Windows + C#. We were especially deterred by Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft to protect their IP in Java. Whatever the merits of this case, using technologies owned by litigious companies is a risk.

Re:Better late than early

[MrNaz]

"Perl developer" is a misnomer. The appropriate term is "Voodoo practitioner".

Re:Better late than early

[MrNaz]

20/10 times as productive? Why didn't you juss say "twice as productive" ?

Re:Better late than early

[David Gerard]

I'm a Solaris admin for a living. Their hardware - particularly their x86 boxes - are actually good value for money, well-built, reliable enough. Solaris is robust enough for industrial use and has very good backward compatibility, and Sun's support is not bad at all. (We have a mix of Solaris 10 and RHEL 4. Some Dells running Solaris and some Sun boxes running RHEL 4.) Red Hat on Dell is a serious competitor for a new Oracle or Java platform, so Sun have to compete properly, and they do okay.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

"...and the space occupied by the applet was essentially devoured by Ajax."

You mean Flash.

Re:Better late than early

[David Gerard]

They have years of backward compatibility to support, and they support it as assiduously as Microsoft do. In theory, SunOS 4 binaries will Just Work on Solaris 10, and if they don't it's a reportable bug. (In practice, it's usually because the app was doing something bogus or smart-arsed to tweak the system, but anyway.)

Unlike Microsoft, Sun has a much better platform (Unix) to support backward compatibility on. They also have the "whole widget" advantage for backward compatibility and forward development, of course - but e.g. Fujitsu SPARC boxes running Solaris have the same backward compatibility.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years ago, yes. I remember my perl days fondly, and CPAN meant you could bring a load of tested, working libraries and put them together and create a system rapidly.

It took Java quite some time to get a decent sized library (and still there is no central repository, unless you stick with the Apache projects only).

Btw, I doubt 1500 Java Developers working on 40 projects would be very efficient, that's nearly 40 a project, it would collapse. And if the project was big enough to split up into subprojects, then one Perl developer would be in seriously over their head regardless of their skills.

Re:Better late than early

[David Gerard]

Yeah. Huge Jenga stacks of Java code, waiting for you to pull out the wrong stick. A goddamn PITA to administer.

Still, it has the advantage that Java really is that portable - you really can slide a SPARC box out from underneath and put a Red Hat box in its place. (Then porting all the Unixy stuff from Solaris to Red Hat is a twisty maze of passages, all different. After a while you become allergic to bash-isms or ksh-isms in alleged "/bin/sh" scripts. Then there's devs who write a script on their Windows box and ftp it to the Red Hat server with the CR-LF line endings intact, upon which it of course doesn't work ...)

Re:Better late than early

[David Gerard]

Oh Ghod. You're right. Sun actually invented something worse than COBOL.

Re:Better late than early

[David Gerard]

Once Java is properly open sourced, I predict an explosion in open source Java apps. At which time the Java system will get optimisations in performance and usability at a furious rate.

Re:Better late than early

[David Gerard]

40 excellent developers can outdo 1500 mediocre developers in any language, though.

Re:Better late than early

[TuringTest]

Oh, but Python is strongly typed.

What, you meant static typing check on function declarations? Well, you can have that in Python, too. But I can't see how that single feature can make a language suitable for enterprise work.

Re:Better late than early

[GuldKalle]

Yeah, I mean, why don't we all just start programming in brainf*ck or lolcode or something?

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear, hear.

I'm in the same boat with some "dumped by the company" Windows software.

I'll never again in my life pay a penny for anything that is proprietary closed source.

Not open source ? I'm not interested.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

If those people moved to Google, can we then expect Google to become mired in similar internal issues?

Yes.

Re:Better late than early

[Ox0065]

So, now java is GPL'd, does that mean I might be able to build a 1.6 JDK that runs on a hardened (i.e. RSBAC) server optimised for amd64? So, BTW ,what have you been running your enterprise's mission critical Java apps on? a VM? (^-^) Compile once, then.... ...this is about Java becoming what it's always pretended to be.

At the same time, I take your point. Most Unis are making Java programmers. Most big enterprises are using them.
Their new proprietary clunkers that their existence depends on are Java
Their old proprietary clunkers that their existence depends on are COBOL.
I once met a Japanese literature major (from the 'right' Uni) in Japan who's BIG ASSED company made her a COBOL programmer. (^-^)
and there was one old guy who knew how it all worked...

Re:Better late than early

[davecb]

Whereas I see it as merely part of the l ong-drawn-out fight to keep Microsoft from doing an embrace, extend and extinguish on them.

You may remember that the MS java compiler gained some hidden MS-only extensions. That led to a large court case which MS lost, and a large payment to Sun for misusing the trademark.

Now that MS Java, renamed C#, is fully incompatible with real Java, there's no longer a reason to protect the trademark.

--dave

Re:Better late than early

[BillShepp]

Java ME was open sourced shortly after SE. See the mobile and embedded community at java.net.

Re:Better late than early

[m50d]

The thing is, before Java, sun tried doing the whole open source thing, with Tcl/Tk. Which was (and is) a superb language, but got a resounding "meh" from the community; see RMS' response (and note that neither of the languages he says the GNU is going to come up with has materialized; instead 10 years later we still have a huge mishmash of incompatible configuration file formats on linux). So given that, I can't blame Sun for saying sod this open source lark, let's appeal to business people, with Java.

Re:Better late than early

[geminidomino]

and at that time Java was every bit as proprietary as VB and other close dead-end languages. No. The documentation of the VM was available, so you could program your own. See kaffe, see gcj etc.

You could develop and run java progeam without Sun's machine and be compatible with it. I can't say that this is true for VB. Judging by my experiences with gcj,I can't say that it's true for Java, either.

Re:Better late than early

[Tim C]

Java's tools (while not as good IDE-wise as VB)

I have used both Eclipse and a couple of releases of VisualStudio.NET, and while neither of them are anything like perfect, Eclipse wins hands down in terms of features. Don't get me wrong, it still sucks in a hundred different ways, but it sucks less.

Re:Better late than early

[domatic]

they didnt sign a clause in OO that allows it to be used in StarOffice.

That is true of their OS X GUI efforts but I don't believe it true of bugfixes to the OO core code.

Re:Better late than early

[Cyberax]

Nope. Sun JVM has always been much more open than VB.

You could ALWAYS download sources of JVM (I'm not completely sure about Sun JDK 1.0, but you could download JVM sources since 1997 for sure).

You could even port them to another platform (look at FreeBSD port, for example).

The only problem: the license for this code was not open.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing

Oh you think Java is not big ? You're right. It's not big. It's freakingly monstrously HUGE. I say HHUUGGEE. Need examples: you can't make a non-cash payment anymore without having Java involved the process (think about that next time you use your credit card or do a wire transfer using your bank's website). Java took over the Real World [TM] by storm. Major banks are switching they're entire infrastructure to Java (no, the Real World [TM] payments are NOT running on C#/.Net ;)

The JVM is just rock solid, it just works. Google is high on Java (GMail? GWT? Android?)... Besides the iPhone, you'll have a hard time buying a phone that doesn't have a JVM. FedEx has more Java programmers than Sun. Wanna talk about eBay? Do you have any of how big Java is amongst the biggest websites? Java is part of the Blu-Ray specs. Want to know what % of the Global Fortune 1000 are using Java ?

If you think that Java lost ground in the Real World [TM] backend, you're seriously high on dope.

Java is basically the biggest computer language success story that happened in the last 20 years. Its reign will last longer than the one of our dear old COBOL.

Not to mention project like Scala, that run on top of that bullet-proof JVM, and that are very interesting languages.

The languages has ugly warts but the JVM is pretty much bullet-proof. It's rock-solid Real-World-[TM]-powering-technology. Writing something like "Sun thought that Java was going to be the next Big Thing" is just trollish.

Now I have to concede that even tough Java is omnipresent on most devices, websites, banks, whatever, it did not eliminate the other languages from the surface of earth. That is true, I concede it to you.

I'm amazed that it's 2008 and people are still trolling with nonsense like 'applets are slow' / 'applets are a failure' while they're living in Real World [TM] that is pretty much Java powered (think of it next time you do a payment will you please? think of how your favorite language is NOT involved in the process and how Java is).

Of course clueless comments like yours are still modded +5 insightful by all the Java haters.

Ignorance is bliss.

Re:Better late than early

[hanshotfirst]

Had it been FOSS back when my company (at the time) was trying to decide what language to standardize on, it would definitely NOT have been picked. FOSS=evil to the management at the time (The VP wanted to have someone he could call and swear at if there was any problem). In retrospect, not using java for that company may have been a good thing.

Re:Better late than early

[daem0n1x]

I've been using Eclipse for a bunch of years and now I have to use M$VS for C++ and I'm not satisfied. I hope they finish the Eclipse CDT integration with the M$ compiler so I can go back to Eclipse again.

Re:Better late than early

[Just Some Guy]

For one thing Python is dynamically typed and Java isn't and there are a lot of cases where I personally prefer the rigor of a language with strict typing.

Python is dynamically, strictly typed.

Or perhaps you're a bit confused between Java and JavaScript? A lot of people make that mistake.

Yeah, we had been seriously considering rewriting our core business logic modules in JavaScript.

Re:Better late than early

[SecondHand]

This article doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know already.

Who cares about the article. Don't you just love to discuss it all again?

Re:Better late than early

[Abcd1234]

Or maybe it's just because Python (or Ruby or ) doesn't come close to having the level of corporate or community backing and support that Java does.

Like it or not, companies *like* the idea of a big corporation being the face behind something like Java. It means stability, predictability, support, long-term viability. It means someone you can bitch to if things go wrong. I means, in short, a sort of corporate legitimacy that's craved by upper-management types. And you can't that by simply being technically better (not that Python is better). Otherwise, we'd all be running around hacking code in Lisp and Smalltalk.

Re:Better late than early

[Just Some Guy]

The thing is, before Java, sun tried doing the whole open source thing, with Tcl/Tk. Which was (and is) a superb language, but got a resounding "meh" from the community;

In all fairness, that's very much a statement of opinion. I don't like Tcl/Tk for my own reasons, and didn't know until this post that RMS also disliked it.

instead 10 years later we still have a huge mishmash of incompatible configuration file formats on linux).

I don't follow you here. Is Tcl good at parsing config files?

So given that, I can't blame Sun for saying sod this open source lark, let's appeal to business people, with Java.

Well, they've done lots with FOSS besides Java and Tcl. :-)

Re:Better late than early

[Just Some Guy]

The VP wanted to have someone he could call and swear at if there was any problem

Even if I'm not partial to Java, I despise that way of thinking. As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft EOLed Visual FoxPro, thereby forcing us to invest a lot of programmer hours in migrating to something else. I am under no illusion that I can call Steve Ballmer and swear at him.

Re:Better late than early

[agbinfo]

I was correcting the spelling and grammar of someone whose language skills are even worst than mine and I was about to correct his usage of the word "till."

Fortunately, I looked it up first and came across the etymology of the word. Till was itself derived from "til" so even without the apostrophe, it's correct. However, I guess because so many people have been making the same mistake, "'til" is accepted by Merriam Webster. However, The Firefox English US speller seems to disagrees about "til" and "'til". Till it does, I'll use "till" to avoid the red underlining.

Re:Better late than early

[zsau]

I was correcting the spelling and grammar of someone whose language skills are even worst than mine and I was about to correct his usage of the word "till."

I'm pleased you did; every time someone writes "'til", a kitten dies. ("'Til" is the only misspelling which makes my blood boil, but I make no apologies for that.)

Till was itself derived from "til" so even without the apostrophe, it's correct.

That logic is not correct. "Debt" was at one stage spelt "det" and "dette", but neither of those spellings are correct today.

Re:Better late than early

[agbinfo]

Till was itself derived from "til" so even without the apostrophe, it's correct. That logic is not correct. "Debt" was at one stage spelt "det" and "dette", but neither of those spellings are correct today. You're right; the logic is incorrect. However, according to Merriam Webster it's still acceptable.

Re:Better late than early

[shish]

There are also over 7000 jobs for "kitten" o_O

Re:Better late than early

[drolli]

I found the experiences with kaffe not so bad. I agree, there are issues, but overall if you write a program (exclude GUI) to handle some data, it will most likely work with all implementations.

Re:Better late than early

[redxxx]

It's nice that Sun is open-sourcing Java. But it's also kind of funny/sad that only Sun would invent a hugely successful product, not make a dime on it, and yet keep it closed-sourced for 13 years.

So, they just default to installing the Google Toolbar with the jre because google kicks butt? I'm sure they have made a few dimes off of it.

Re:Better late than early

[fm6]

Nowadays, we also have good but cheap hardware. I'm the docs lead for this Opteron-based system, which is pretty affordable and will soon be available with Barcelona quad-core CPUs.

As for our future growth, obviously we are destined to overtake IBM, put HP and Dell out of business, and reverse global warming. Come on, what else did you expect me to say?

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that, I think Sun was smart enough to see long ago that Microsoft and IBM wanted to control Java. The landscape is very different now and it's time to let Java it's potential on the Open Source side.

Re:Better late than early

[The_reformant]

If you think Java has lost serious ground to Python and Ruby you're fairly deluded. Running JSPs in tomcat isnt that popular sure, but the J2EE stack is used all over the show in thousands of enterprise critical apps.

Re:Better late than early

[The_reformant]

There are several JREs available, even *if* sun goes under its not likely that the IBM one is going to go away anytime soon.

Re:Better late than early

[OutOnARock]

Then you must love that Sun is expanding the JVM to be a VM with Python as the first addition!

Re:Better late than early

[MillionthMonkey]

Oh yeah? I heard global warming was caused by Sun in the first place.

Re:Better late than early

[MemoryDragon]

# Java: 15786 jobs # Python: 1395 jobs # Ruby: 757 jobs Maybe it takes 11.316 times as many Java developers to do what a single Pythor can do, eh? The myth of untyped agile scripting languages, I spend 80% of my time in those languages the increased productivity is a myth. You usually get it in small projects to the agile nature and lots of shortcuts those languages provide. But they have a hell of a problem to scale decently in the average team projects after they hit a certain size. The reason for this is that their strengs in small projects tend to explode in the face of big projects unless you have a good team and intensive code review and unit testing on the codebase. The normal project team consisting of a handful of good people and lots of mediocre ones definetly are bound to fail in those languages. I would say most people who post about the superiority of those languages simply only have done smaller stuff with it. The main issue is, that the bigger the codesize, the less you get the advantages, after all business algorithms cannot be shortcutted too much like simple things like file iterations with operators. No typechecking means extensive unit testing and programming lots of type contracts into the module interfaces, there goes the advantage of less code down the train. Add to that aop handling on language level in the worst case down on a meta class and you will have someone in your team who shoots dangerous contracts into your code because it saves a few locs... I would not say that java is perfect, it is very verbose, but the original designers did a hell of a job of designing a language which is really suitable to build big systems which can run out of the box for years. It maybe was not their intention but it definitely turned out that way.

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

Java lost ground to Ruby? Are you kidding?

Re:Better late than early

[m50d]

I don't follow you here. Is Tcl good at parsing config files?

The creators suggested using Tcl itself for configuration - it's very easy to embed in another program, and powerful without getting in the way if you just want to use it like an ini file.

Re:Better late than early

[Just Some Guy]

The myth of untyped agile scripting languages

...is a myth. All of the languages you listed are strongly typed and ready for large application development.

Re:Better late than early

[Tablizer]

Although I prefer a "scriptish" style, I do tend to agree with you. Each has its place. However, many large applicatons *can* be broken up into multiple smaller apps so that they can be treated like the smaller projects and kept simple and nimble. It is not always possible to split like this, but not enough large companies do split when it is possible. The trick is, in my experience, to use the database as the "hub" to coordinate the multiple apps.

Re:Better late than early

[dodobh]

'/' in common English is also used to indicate 'or'. BTW, are you the same MrNaz from #postgresql on freenode?

Re:Better late than early

[Anonymous Coward]

on it's own

"its".

only last febuary

"February".

Re:Better late than early

[MemoryDragon]

Exactly but that does not resolve that issue that you have to have a more rigorouse testing in place (way more) and that you have to enforce interface contracts a lot more due to the fact that the language does not do it. The bigger the code the less advantage you get from the many shortcuts scripting languages usually provide and the more you have to do on the testing and contractual side. You can split many problems apart true, but many you cant to a level that you only have small scripts :-(

I'll believe it when ManBearPig flies.

[Anonymous Coward]

We've all heard this from Sun before, but this time I am sure it is for realz. I won't be shocked if it "Open Sourced" under the CDL and prohibits integration with the GPL Linux Kernel, along with my precious ZFS.

Re:I'll believe it when ManBearPig flies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez, could you be any more of an uninformed idiot? /chandler
Go google OpenJDK and stop making an ass of yourself. It's embarrassing.

Re:I'll believe it when ManBearPig flies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is modding this Anonymous Coward up? It's a blatant troll. The CDDL is an OSI-approved license, and who wants to integrate Java into the Linux kernel anyway?

Re:I'll believe it when ManBearPig flies.

[isilrion]

I believe they said Java would be GPL+classpath and that they were considering GPLv3. ZFS is, irrc, GPLv3. Linus doesn't want to upgrade to GPLv3, but you can't really blame that on Sun. It seems they learned from the CDDL. (Wow... I'm defending Sun. That's unexpected)

Re:I'll believe it when ManBearPig flies.

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS is not GPLv3 it's CDDL. Linus has said that if ZFS became GPLv3 he would seriously consider attempting to move the kernel to GPLv3.

Re:I'll believe it when ManBearPig flies.

[wawannem]

call me an old-timer, but I remember a time when the linux kernel attempted to support java - http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v1.3/100/fs/binfmt_java.c

Kudos to them, I guess

[Tenebrousedge]

I would pose the following question to slashdot: how has Java being closed source affected you personally, and what effects do you see this having in the future?

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It will install without having to agree the licens agreement? ... no, it's just open source, will the license change?

It won't make much difference for me as an end user, unless it will come default installed with the distro.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[TheLinuxSRC]

It has affected me personally by being a pain in the ass to install (back in the day) and more than willing to step on any other Java implementation I may have (more recently - ie blackdown etc...). The main effect this will have on the future is to remove this pain because now the distribution will be able to include it in their repositories, thus accounting for conflicts and dependencies so I don't have to. The only problem is that I now almost never use Java and will actively look for similar programs that are not written in Java to accomplish the same task just so I don't have to deal with Java. Java could have been something 10 years ago. Now, it is too little too late IMHO.

Also, if you read the article, you will see that the new and improved Open Source Java will be missing some features (ie sound). So this isn't so much open-sourcing Java as it is removing the last offending bits that cannot be open-sourced and hoping they will be coded back in.

Just my $0.02.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[rjcarr]

I don't know if this will change with the announcement, but being a java developer that works on macs, I'd like to get whatever jdk I want, and not be forced to use what apple gives me.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[r_jensen11]

I would pose the following question to slashdot: how has Java being closed source affected you personally, and what effects do you see this having in the future? I don't really care too much about the proprietary-ness of Java. Since I'm not a Linux zealot, I just care that it does what I want it to do. I didn't care that VMWare is proprietary when I tried it out, nor did I care about propriety when I tried out Maya.

I suspect I'm with the majority of /. here, but not with the vocal minority of Linux users (I have to specific Linux users because of the also [very] vocal Apple users.)

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing, this is vaporware.

Not much of a Java fan anyway.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[linguae]

Before I bought my Mac in summer 2006, I was a FreeBSD user. At the time, FreeBSD users were not able to download FreeBSD binaries of the latest versions of Java due to a licensing agreement IIRC; instead, they had to either download a binary of the older version, download the Linux binary and use FreeBSD's Linux binary emulation, or download the source code of Java (with a very restrictive license) and compile it, which took a long time. Now that Java will be fully open-source in the near future, life for FreeBSD users (as well as other platforms where Java is unsupported) would be much easier, as pre-compiled binaries would be allowed to be distributed without Sun's permission. A lot of us don't have the time to waste multiple hours compiling software.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

I never bothered with Java because it was closed source. Now we have harmony, ecj and Jikes so Sun aren't really losing anything by open sourcing it.

I recently played with Java a little but the stdlib needs dusting off and rebooting if I'm ever going to start using it seriously. With concurrency on everyones agenda, cross-compiling your apps being a PITA and the only other alternative being a patent trap, I'd say java could have a healthy future.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[dreamchaser]

I agree. I have used Linux in one form or another since pre-kernel 1.0 days, *long* before it was 'fashionable, but it's just another tool in my opinion. I use Windows, Mac OS, Solaris, Linux...whatever tool suits my need at the time.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[SeePage87]

It's ok guys, I'll handle this.

How has Java being closed source affected you personally I can't count the number of times I've cried myself to sleep thinking of the poor children who blindly agree to arbitrary EULAs which they are incapable of understanding.

What effects do you see this having in the future

Now those children blindly agree to the somewhat less arbitrary GPL which they are incapable of understanding.

This is truly a magnificent day!

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Spasemunki]

Hassle, more than anything else, sums it up. Installing the JDK or JRE is never as easy as installing other programs. Some distros won't include Java in their standard package repositories because of licensing constraints. You end up with two maintenance/upgrade processes: one for Java, and one for everything else. It's a pain if you have a lot of machines that need to run java- you're always manually copying around install tarballs and jar libraries that you can't just yum or apt-get out of the appropriate repo. Difficulty in Java installation is also a barrier for simple desktop Linux; at this point, Java should Just Work for any reasonable desktop experience.

I suspect that the closed sourcing is also why support for Java on non-priority systems has lagged behind. It's been a while, but I used to support Java apps that were running on FreeBSD. At the time, the state of Java there lagged behind the big three (Linux, Windows, Solaris) considerably- the latest versions of of the JDK/JRE weren't always available, and when they were there were sometimes weird bugs lurking in them that would cause applications to puke. Support for other languages wasn't anywhere near as far behind because it was much easier for BSD developers to track changes in the source of languages that primarily targeted Linux.

For that matter, despite Suns attempts at making Java a universal platform, support on some platforms has been better than others. My employer bought a 3rd party Java HR application for employees to use for leave/VK time reporting, with the promise that it would work for any system since it's Java (a lot of people have Linux or Mac). No such luck. It's interface is an applet that works on only certain versions of the JRE under windows. Maybe the vendor is just incompetent, but Java is supposed to simplify the writing of cross-platform applications. I strongly suspect that these kinds of problems are a consequence of Sun keeping the source closed: priorities on development of the JRE/JDK had to be constrained by Sun's resources and economic priorities. No matter how enthusiastic the user community on lower-priority operating systems, they couldn't fix problems themselves.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

My Linux distribution always had an inferior Java implementation bundled with it. I had to download the Sun JVM separately, update paths and symbolic links to make it the system default. Then I couldn't easily remove the bundled JVM because of RPM dependencies with other packages. This news gives me hope that I won't have to go through this exercise any more.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[trybywrench]

it's sort of a pain to install Java(tm) correctly on the linux distros i use because they use GCJ by default and it's tied to their automated update systems.

Allowing distros to include it natively means one less step to getting a linux install with full blown Java off the ground and hopefully automated JRE/JDK updates.

Also, with full Java included in the distro maybe things like Eclipse, Tomcat and the other Java centric software will start getting included.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[jimicus]

Sadly the Apache 2.0 license, which all the Apache Java code uses basically exclusively, is incompatible with the GPLv2. And, yes, it matters, because Java code links at runtime. This means that you fall under the GPL's "derived code" sections, Surely that's only an issue if you distribute in-memory runtime code (ie. stuff that's been through a JIT compiler)?

If compiled code as distributed hasn't got any code linked in at the point of distribution, then I wouldn't think it would be an issue.

If anything, it's more of an issue with C because that links at compile time, essentially forcing you to reinvent the wheel or write an abstraction layer if you plan to use anything that's part of a GPL C library.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I would pose the following question to slashdot: how has Java being closed source affected you personally, and what effects do you see this having in the future?

For one thing, we won't have to listen to RMS whining about it every time someone mentions the current version of OpenOffice.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[BrainInAJar]

Somewhat less arbitrary?

Can you link to GPL code at runtime? are you sure? Forget what RMS has to say outside the scope of the license, do you think you could reasonably sue someone under the viral clause for runtime linking to GPL code?

What about the nVidia hacks? legal or no?

All the places the GPL has been tested have been for obvious violations, it's the edge cases that make it arbitrary

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[CajunArson]

A lot of us don't have the time to waste multiple hours compiling software.

And the rest of us use Gentoo. If this new "open source" Java takes less than a week to compile, I will be extremely disappointed in Sun's efforts!

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Tenebrousedge]

Well, to be fair, those are complicated legal documents that exist because of an equally complicated copyright system, that rarely have any direct effects on the majority of the population. The arbitrary EULAs don't seem to hold up all that well in courtroom environments anyway.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[SeePage87]

Wow, I just thought it would sound funnier that way, but you took it all serious like.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Bogtha]

how has Java being closed source affected you personally

I installed ejabberd, an Erlang-based Jabber server on FreeBSD this week from ports. For some reason it needed a JDK to install. Normal ports installation didn't work because FreeBSD doesn't have a distribution license. I had to download the file manually, put it in the right directory, then go back to the Sun website, register an account there, log in, download a timezone update, and put that in the right directory too. Only at that point could I install it. And I didn't even want Java in the first place!

The whole process was pointless (it's not like my manual downloading gained Sun anything worthwhile) and felt like a throwback to downloading Slackware floppy disk images back in the early 90s. Every other piece of software I've installed through ports has been downloaded and installed automatically, like it should. But because of this idiotic imaginary property idea, I've got to mess around trying to make the computer happy instead of it doing work for me. This is 2008, I shouldn't have to jump through hoops for bullshit reasons.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[nguy]

I would pose the following question to slashdot: how has Java being closed source affected you personally

It's basically meant that Sun had free reign to ruin Java.

and what effects do you see this having in the future?

None. It's too late to fix Java.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[PitaBred]

Generally the vendor is incompetent. Java won't prevent you from hard-coding "C:\Program Files" into any programs, and will work perfectly well with it under Windows. For most properly coded Java programs, cross-platform support is pretty much trivial though.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It made it much harder to install, on Linux at least.

I suspect the inability to fork it made things worse, in the short term. I tried using Swing back in the 1.2/1.3 days, and it was miserable. (I'm told it's better now.) Sun really dragged their feet on fixing any of the small, easily-fixable things that were very broken about it. If somebody had been able to fork Java and make a "Hot Beverage" system (different name, fully compatible, fixes to Swing), my users would have been a lot happier. Heck, *I* might have forked it.

Java seemed to evolve at a glacial pace. (Autoboxing took how many years?) I can't say that it would have been faster if it'd been open-source, but I did notice all languages where interesting things were happening were the open-source languages (Python, Ruby, etc.). Thus, "open-source language" is a positive attribute in my mind, and Sun did little to convince me otherwise.

Whenever I've written a GUI in a non-Java language, I've used GTK+, Qt, or wxW. I've found all of these to be better than Swing. They're all open-source. You can get Java bindings for these, today, but they were a long time coming. That's not surprising to me: why would anybody want to spend time writing language bindings for an open-source toolkit for a closed-source language implementation?

I eventually moved all my work over to open-source languages. If there'd been an open-source Java all along, I probably would not have.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Trogre]

Well perhaps we can start deploying it in nuclear control facilities?

But seriously, it would be great to see working 64-bit implementations in various distro repositories.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[notamisfit]

The license issued with the open source Java toolkits (based on the GNU Classpath library) explicitly permits linking with non-GPL modules.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[bigstrat2003]

how has Java being closed source affected you personally Not at all. I'm not an open-source zealot, and I choose the best tool for the job, whether it's open-source, proprietary, or personally written by my worst enemy.

what effects do you see this having in the future? Zealots will stop whining. Sensible people won't really care.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Chandon Seldon]

Since I'm not a Linux zealot, I just care that it does what I want it to do.

Not caring about licensing questions probably means that you've failed to consider them in depth. That probably seems like a very reasonable choice - if you wanted to worry about legal issues you would have gone to law school - but it's also very short sighted.

"Freedom" seems abstract and irrelevant until you find out that the elegant technical solution you want to implement is disallowed by the license of some component you're using. This rarely happens immediately, because you wouldn't have picked a tool if it didn't let you do what you initially wanted, but it comes up pretty frequently when you try to do something that you didn't initially consider.

Examples:

- You design your application using Oracle as the database. $20,000 a server seems fine - until you realize that the whole design would be more elegant if you moved a bunch of logic into the database and replicated it a bunch of times (say... at each client site). But $20,000 * 100 sites isn't in the budget, so you're forced to scrap the best technical solution for legal reasons.

- You design a data entry interface in Flash. The project expands, and it turns out that it'd be more effective if the users used tablets rather than PCs to do their data entry. So you bring on a hardware team, and they tell you that ARM tablets cost 1/3rd what x86 tablets would cost. Sadly, there's no flash player on ARM - and with your budget it would have been a simple port, too.

Far from being irrelevant and abstract, the issue of licensing is directly relevant to anyone selecting software to build anything important (software or any business process). Proprietary licensing means usage constraints - both explicit constraints like the limited set of Flash platforms and economic constraints like the per-server Oracle license fee. Developing on proprietary stuff is like working in a mine field - sometimes you have to do it, but it's sure as hell something you want to avoid.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[ttfkam]

I've been able to "apt-get install sun-java5-jdk" for a couple of years now on Debian and Ubuntu. Don't blame Java, blame FreeBSD.

You're right. This is 2008. You shouldn't have to jump through hoops for bullshit distro reasons when the packaging was a solved problem.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Isomer]

Java couldn't be installed by my distro, and while I could install it by hand, it's annoying to do by hand. And to make matters worse, to install by hand required you to play EULA hopscotch through Sun's site to download it.

And because Java itself wasn't in any of the distro repositories, no program that depended on java would be in the repositories either. So any java program I wanted to run was going to be annoying to install, so I would often try and find an alternative in a more usefully supported language that could be managed by my package manager.

The Java browser plugin, requiring java was also a pain to install, so I never bothered with sites that required a java plugin -- it was too much hassle.

So all in all, I rarely, if ever, had any java software on my machine, and I suspect this is true of a lot of people. I suspect this had a chilling effect on Java under Linux/*BSD's, or on websites as plugins since people would tend to use/support/develop on software that was more easily installable.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[pembo13]

Well I use Fedora, and not much Java... so I don't have any Java on my desktop... so if a site needs java, I simply hit the [x]

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[mark-t]

How it affected me personally was the fact that I wanted to run a 64 bit OS, but Java's browser plugin wasn't developed for it at the time, which I required, forcing me downgrade my system from 64-bit to 32.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Spasemunki]

But even on windows, it worked for version (I think) 1.4 but not version 1.5; either they did some real digging in order to find forward-incompatible features, or the Sun-provided JRE broke some subtle assumptions about how code worked at the implementation level. Things went back to working under 1.6 on Windows- all of this without changes to the applet itself. That to me sounds like a JRE issue- I know that on FreeBSD, some JREs would segfault running certain byte code, while others had no problems. No changes to the Java application.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Bogtha]

I've been able to "apt-get install sun-java5-jdk" for a couple of years now on Debian and Ubuntu.

And the reason for that is that Sun grants special permission to Linux and OpenSolaris distributions to do so under the DJL. From the FAQ:

What is the Operating System Distribution License for Java (a.k.a. the "Distro License for Java" or DLJ)?

The DLJ is a license created specifically for individuals and communities who want to distribute Sun's binary Java Development Kit (JDK) or Java Runtime Environment (JRE) with a Linux or OpenSolaris Operating System (OS) distribution.

See FreeBSD listed there? Have a look around the site, every single mention of operating systems permitted under this agreement is specifically scoped to Linux and OpenSolaris only. That's why Ubuntu has a head-start on FreeBSD, not because they are better at packaging.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

hmnn who modded this moron +5 interesting?

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Jason Earl]

One of the funny things about the software world, especially outside of the Windows community, is that the zealots generally end up winning. Java is actually a very good example of this principle.

Sun and IBM have been spending money right and left for years promoting Java, and yet in many ways it is a complete failure. As a technology for creating desktop applications Java never arrived, and as an technology for creating applets it has been completely dominated by Flash. It has achieved some level of success as a web development language, but even on this front it has had serious trouble competing.

When .NET and C# came out Sun finally realized that it's entire existence depended on the success of Java, and that success was in serious jeopardy. The only real saving grace that Java had over .NET was that Java had quite a bit of Free Software that had grown up around it, despite Sun's best efforts to discourage Free Software. As an example of how ridiculous things had gotten it was actually easier to develop desktop applications for Solaris using Mono and C# than it was to use Sun's own Java.

So at long last Sun realized that it had to start encouraging Free Software developers to use Java, and the only way to do that was to Free Java.

You might believe that sensible people don't care about these issues, but sensible people wouldn't choose Java if it weren't for the myriad Free Software tools that come with Java these days. Free Software is so important that even Microsoft is actively courting Free Software developers to work on its platforms.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Constantine XVI]

I'm going to ignore you being a buzzkill long enough to tell you that, in this particular instance, Sun is using the GPL with the Classpath exception, which means that it's perfectly okay to link to it without invoking the viral clause.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[GuidoW]

I have a few ultrasparc machines running linux. There is no working implementation of Java available for them, so I have to without it.

(I could install solaris on them, but I just like linux better.)

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is now fully supported on FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org/java/) and now more hackery is needed!

But you're right. It was quite frusterating how much petitioning and effort the FreeBSD Foundation had to put into getting Sun to approve an offical port, even though the foundation footed the bill for all work involved.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It has affected me personally by being a pain in the ass to install

Java is super easy to install on a Unix/Linux server, and it can seamlessly exist with multiple other Java installations. What problems do you have?

Installation usually means:

* Unpack:

"tar zxf jdk-6.x-solaris-sparc.tar.gz" or "./jdk-6-linux-i586.bin".

* And modifying your environment:

export JAVA_HOME=/path/to_your/java
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$JAVA_HOME/man

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Idiot with a gun]

Amen! It's not fun if it's easy.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

How it has affected me personally: I tried to write a small java app and gave up at "couldn't install the dev kit on my machine with a reasonable ammount of work."

How does it affect me in the future: I wouldn't bother trying again. To me this is just a dead-code dump.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[abigor]

Disclaimer: I am not a Java fan, and particularly not a J2EE fan. But just so you know, Java is basically THE enterprise web app development language, and indeed THE enterprise language period. At this point in time, pretty much all the big server-side stuff is written in Java.

You talk about "trouble competing" - it hasn't had to compete. There is no choice, in the minds of management everywhere. It has been a massive, enormous success (measured in terms of penetration) in the enterprise, and there are so many lines of deployed Java running everything from corporate IT to banking to network management systems that it is truly astounding. Most of it sucks, of course, but my point is that your comment implies Java is on shaky ground in terms of acceptance, and that is totally naive, particularly in the corporate world. When I go to meet clients about projects, there is no debate about which language we're going to use, unfortunately. It is a de facto corporate standard.

And even for the web front ends, I see GWT getting more and more popular, so who knows. When Google makes their contractors use a particular technology, it tends to leak out and get deployed all over the place as those contractors become enamoured of it.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Braino420]

For one thing, we won't have to listen to RMS whining about it every time someone mentions the current version of OpenOffice.

People still listen to RMS whine? The facts never stopped him from whining before. It makes for a good read. Be sure to continue on into the archive, where there are some real gems like this. It's great, Ubuntu caters to his bitching by coming up with Gobuntu, which meets all of his ridiculous criteria, and he won't recommend it because it sounds like Ubuntu. *dawns flame suit for the large percentage of rms zealots on /.* Seriously, rms DID some great things in the past, but now he just sounds like he took too much acid (and looks like it too). Practicality is what matters in programming; if F/OSS really is better, it will be used. And it will, eventually. But it won't be done if you sit on the sidelines kvetching. It will be if you make coding contributions under the appropriate license and make F/OSS BETTER.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot. He was talking about Java, not Oracle or Flash.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish there were, but it seems there are no (complete) Gtk Java bindings. Not surprising that Gnome folks are skewed towards Mono.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a pain in the ass in a way that typical closed source software hasn't been. Requiring that every time I need to update or recompile I go to their website, remember my password agree to a license which is usually unchanged from last time, and hope that I've remembered all of my patches.

Then start the compile process, hoping that none of the binaries got corrupted on download or not placed into the right place into the correct directory.

So in short, the closed sourcedness isn't much of an issue, but the excessive hoops to jump through when I want to install is a real pain in the ass.

Contrast that with installing my copy of Heroes of might and magic III, from Loki, and it's a totally different experience.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of us don't have the time to waste multiple hours compiling software.

See pkg_add(1), or 'cd /usr/ports/category/program && make package' once and use the resulting binary on multiple systems.

No one says you have to compile from source all the time on FreeBSD (even though that's what most people seem to do).

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Only at that point could I install it. And I didn't even want Java in the first place!

Perhaps you could have dug a bit and tried to understand what was happening in the background:

# The Java applications that are part of the Erlang distribution are
# not strictly necessary - it is included for completeness sake. A
# problem with the Erlang build procedure is that it only checks if
# javac is in the regular path - and then assumes that all of the jdk
# utilities is in the path as well. The only way to make sure that
# this is the case (that I could think of at least) was to make sure
# ${JAVA_HOME}/bin is added to the PATH, using the *_ENV macros. .if !defined(WITHOUT_JAVA)
USE_JAVA= yes
JAVA_VERSION= 1.4+
# Make sure ${JAVA_HOME}/bin is in the path
CONFIGURE_ENV+= PATH=${PATH}:${JAVA_HOME}/bin
MAKE_ENV+= PATH=${PATH}:${JAVA_HOME}/bin
SCRIPT_ENV+= PATH=${PATH}:${JAVA_HOME}/bin .endif

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[cowwoc2001]

That's a silly argument. Nothing preventing Linux distributions from bundling Sun's JRE in the past the same way they do now. The fact that Linux distributions refuse to bundle software with licenses they do not *personally* approve of is not the same thing as saying that the license actually prevented them from doing so.

Open-source extremists have no one to blame but themselves.

Java's source-code was open to the public for over a decade now. The only thing that changed recently is the license, but that license never prevented you from bundling it beforehand.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Xtravar]

Ok, now do it on a x86-64 system, and make sure those browser plugins work!!

FAIL.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Those children don't have to agree to anything. The GPL is a distribution license, not an EULA.

Oh wait. This was a joke. Nevermind.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[bluemonq]

You're an idiot. Since the GGP didn't see any issues of 'freedom' with Java, GP tried out a few other examples that GP might be involved with.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[glitch23]

You design your application using Oracle as the database. $20,000 a server seems fine - until you realize that the whole design would be more elegant if you moved a bunch of logic into the database and replicated it a bunch of times (say... at each client site). But $20,000 * 100 sites isn't in the budget, so you're forced to scrap the best technical solution for legal reasons.

I assume your $20,000 value is the cost of the Oracle license. Although that value sounds about right based on the last I heard the real kicker that you ignored is that the license is per CPU. And of course you hardly can find any server now being sold with a single CPU so your $20,000 cost explodes easily especially when you include the 100 sites you mentioned. Last I heard, Oracle does not consider additional cores as CPUs so we're at least okay in that regard. They still ream you elsewhere (although it's nice that Oracle database is free for personal/test/development work).

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

OK.

After the GP's steps, do this:

tar zxf jdk-6.x-solaris-x86_64.tar.gz" or "./jdk-6-linux-i586_64.bin"

Done.

If your browser doesn't work, use an OS and browser that understands how to run 32- and 64-bit apps on a 64-bit kernel.

And if you think you need a 64-bit browser, you're pretty much a elitist turd anyway.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[moosesocks]

The GPL provides an extremely good framework for an Open Source license, but includes a few too many clauses based upon RMS's personal ethos that make it somewhat unviable for widespread real-world use, not to mention the power trip he went on for GPL3.

I always perceive the GPL as a "fringe" (or far-left, if you will...) license, and have always been surprised that no sort of "moderate" license has come to prominence that finds a sort of happy middle ground between the GPL and Mozilla or BSD Licenses. Heck, even if they copied the GPL word-for-word, but eased up on the interoperability clauses, I'd be perfectly happy.

Where is our Creative Commons license for software? I think that CC has more than proven the importance of customizable licenses that are comprehensible by humans.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[BrainInAJar]

Actually I think you should reexamine the Mozilla/Apache/CDDL style licenses.

They keep your code free, in as far as any code licensed under them can't change licenses, they have the viral clause for that code ( change it? share it. ), but they limit the viral clause to only the files which carry the license. None of the ambiguous "project" language the GPL uses.

more teeth than BSD, not a lunatic communist license like the GPL

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Xtravar]

And if you think you need a 64-bit browser, you're pretty much a elitist turd anyway. What if I load a page that needs 5GB of memory to render?

I can has 64-bit web browser? :(

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[free space]

Seeing that C# evolved much faster than Java (starting from C# 2.0) I made a decision to avoid Java on my own projects if I can, to avoid the moment where my development life is miserable because I need some certain language features not available in Java but avaliable in other comparable languages.

When Sun open sourced the JDK, I began reconsidering that decision, because if OpenJDK reaches enough critical mass the community would probably be much reactive than Sun in evolving the language. And in the worst case I might try dive into the compiler and add what I wanted myself.

Now I'm considering Java where relavent, while occassionaly following the various OpenJDK blogs/wikis to see what progress is being made.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Java not being open source means most Linux distributions will not rely on Java applications. This means even some open source Java applications aren't in repositories. And if they are they are most likely bastardized or neglected.

With Java as open source I can see it becoming part of the base system for some Linux flavors. Especially after they add support for a wider range of languages in the JVM Davinci Machine Project. Pretty much every language will be able to run in a world class, JIT compiled JVM. You can keep your perl, python, ruby, scheme, and common lisp code. Only now it runs faster and has access to all of the Java libraries.

I imagine in the next generation Linux distribution a JVM will be open continuously. And all of the non-native code will pass through it instead of a custom built interpreter.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Alpha830RulZ]

I think you're right on target, but you're treating closed source licensing as a trump card rather than as a factor. The .NET environment, for one good example, can rightfully claim a lot of solid productivity features that could certainly make it worth using ( I don't), and Oracle adherents argue, probably at least partly correctly that it has a lot of enterprise level features that make the expense worthwhile. If you have clear visibility into your app's future, these could be reasonably estimated, and you can analyze whether you have a case for using the closed tech.

That said, I code in Java, Python, Perl, MySQL and Postgres whenever I can. My one weakness is SQL Server, which is pretty reasonably priced for the kind of things I do, and is substantially more usable and productive than the open source DB's. YMMV

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[INowRegretThesePosts]

Also, if you read the article, you will see that the new and improved Open Source Java will be missing some features (ie sound). So this isn't so much open-sourcing Java as it is removing the last offending bits that cannot be open-sourced and hoping they will be coded back in. What? Fro what I understand, they *are* giving more code under the GPL. Previously, Java lacked "some encryption libraries, graphics libraries, the sound engine, and some SNMP management ". Now, it seems that only SNMP and sound are missing, and they will be done in a year.

Now, it is a huge shame that Gentoo does not offer icedtea/OpenJDK ...

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Allador]

What if I load a page that needs 5GB of memory to render? Browser simpler pr0n.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[jhol13]

OpenSolaris.

Honestly, it is just some Linux distros which do not have proper 32 compatibility libs.

I would imagine even Windows can run 32 bit applications batter, but do not have first hand experience.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Chandon Seldon]

you're treating closed source licensing as a trump card rather than as a factor.

If you have clear visibility into your app's future

Seeing into the future is *really hard*. Given a choice between a proprietary platform with potential future licensing woes and a high quality free platform, selecting the free platform simply due to licensing is a good first approximation at the right choice.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[jhol13]

Sun-provided JRE broke some subtle assumptions about how code worked at the implementation level. Funnily this has happened to me more often with C/C++ code than with Java.

Just a bit faster machine -> bing!
Just two cores -> bing!
And with source you get the added benefit of new compilers! Bing bing bing!

Most of the problems I have encountered with Java are exactly same: badly written un-tested programs which cannot handle slightly changed, sometimes concurrent, execution paths.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[laffer1]

FreeBSD has many packages, but not all of them are quite right. Many port maintainers are lazy about plists for ports and don't get all the files. During our transition to "mports", we've uncovered a lot of ports that have very bad plists. The java packages work great, but not everything fits that category.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[mrchaotica]

Can you link to GPL code at runtime?

Yes.

are you sure?

Absolutely.

Hint: the question you should be asking is "can you distribute code which does this?"

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[mdm42]

Of course you couldn't possibly have considered installing some other jabber server, could you? I mean its not as if ejabberd failed to warn you up front that it depended on Java, now did it? But you went ahead anyway... And now you're carping about the dependency...

Stop whining and get over it.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[gnupun]

I would pose the following question to slashdot: how has Java being closed source affected you personally...?

Closed source Java makes no difference to me, since I rarely have to delve into the source. If the Java API does not function as documented, it's a bug and Sun engineers usually fix that.

The main advantage of open-source Java is Sun will save a lot of money by using OSS volunteers to maintain Java, instead of the millions spent in programmer salaries today. As long as programmers are willing to work for free, why not use them?

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[iapetus]

Actually, Sun used to have my favourite EULAs in the computing world. Because they displayed them in editable text areas. The contracts into which I have entered with Sun in order to download Java are many and varied, as a result. And Sun still owe me upwards of $10m for using their software.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[David Gerard]

Yeah. It was the Java on FreeBSD experience that really bludgeoned home that Stallman was right. Again.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument comes down to wah! They charge for their software.
How dare those companies make a profit and how dare their programmers eat and pay their bills.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[TheRaven64]

Java's source-code was open to the public for over a decade now. The only thing that changed recently is the license, but that license never prevented you from bundling it beforehand. Until very recently the Sun JRE license did not allow redistribution. This meant that a Linux distribution could include support for installing it, but the end user would have to download it from Sun, accepting the license conditions. This was true even for the source, which made it a colossal pain on *BSD, since the source distribution required patches to build on *BSD and the BSD projects did not have the rights to distribute derived binaries, meaning that the end user had to get the source from Sun, then the ports system would apply the patches and build it.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[TheRaven64]

eJabberd is currently, by far, the best Jabber server. It doesn't actually depend on Java, it depends on Erlang and the full install of Erlang includes some Java components. If you define WITHOUT_JAVA before building Erlang, then it works fine.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[the_olo]

I don't really care too much about the proprietary-ness of Java. Since I'm not a Linux zealot, I just care that it does what I want it to do.

The problem is, there's a cause-effect relation between the two that you don't seem to comprehend.

With proprietary technology, the chances are much greater that at some point you'll discover that the technology doesn't do what you'd want to.

A practical example: suppose you have a new 64 bit workstation with a fresh, new, 64 bit operating system on it and most of the software is 64 bit too. So you've been browsing pages with your 64 bit browser for a couple of weeks now, and you stumble upon a page that features a Java applet and requires it to work properly.

Now you have a real problem, since there's no Java browser plug-in for 64 bit architectures yet.

If Sun's Java had been released on a liberal license a couple of years ago, now we would probably have full support for a much larger set of architectures, including AMD64. Maybe PowerPC and others as well - the community would pick this up and work on porting according to general populace's needs.

Instead we have a large populace of angry users who wait 3 years (and will probably wait another one) for support of a quite popular hardware platform because the control has been in the hands of a single entity - Sun.

The same problem is with all the other technologies - and you are likely to be burned by this problem in the future if VmWare decides that you have to upgrade to something new or that your little interoperability problems mean nothing to them.

And it's you who will have to answer to your customers/bosses on your own for the limitations artificially imposed by a vendor, for the problems that are beyond your control. Unless you really don't care and don't take responsibility for results of your work, but then you should qualify for the position at the bottom of the IT food chain - like a helpdesk/support job...

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[thsths]

> I have a few ultrasparc machines running linux. There is no working implementation of Java available for them, so I have to without it.

And even with Solaris, you would not get a browser plug-in for a 64bit browser. Ok, maybe you do not need more than 2GB of address space in a browser, but it is still a bizarre limitation.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[vikstar]

- You design a data entry interface in Flash. The project expands, and it turns out that it'd be more effective if the users used tablets rather than PCs to do their data entry. So you bring on a hardware team, and they tell you that ARM tablets cost 1/3rd what x86 tablets would cost. Sadly, there's no flash player on ARM - and with your budget it would have been a simple port, too. So you're saying that if Flash was FOSS then it would be easier to write a flash player for a different CPU than to write your user interface in a different SDK?

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[cowwoc2001]

Java's source-code was open to the public for over a decade now. The only thing that changed recently is the license, but that license never prevented you from bundling it beforehand. Until very recently the Sun JRE license did not allow redistribution. This meant that a Linux distribution could include support for installing it, but the end user would have to download it from Sun, accepting the license conditions. This was true even for the source, which made it a colossal pain on *BSD, since the source distribution required patches to build on *BSD and the BSD projects did not have the rights to distribute derived binaries, meaning that the end user had to get the source from Sun, then the ports system would apply the patches and build it. Okay so I would agree with you on *BSD but there really was no reason (as far as I know) for Linux distributions for not bundling Sun's binaries. And last I checked, Linux makes up a sizable market share (with respect to *BSD).

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[JAlexoi]

FYI: That "very restrictive license" says that you cannot redistribute, modify the code and call it Java, and the usual copyright stuff. Otherwise you can use as you wish! Not like, you "can't use it on a commercial project".

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[JAlexoi]

Oh, yeah... I did know that RTFM was never popular with ./'ers, but not reading RELEASE NOTES? That is new to me. Or the existence of release notes is new to you.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[JAlexoi]

Hm... I think i've seen java in the FreeBSD ports...

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Tim C]

But $20,000 * 100 sites isn't in the budget,

And it almost certainly wouldn't need to be, as Oracle offers a range of different licencing options depending on the intended use of the product. No, it won't be as cheap as free, but I guarantee that in the vast majority of cases it'll be a lot less than simply $numberSites * $internetFacingCost.

I do actually agree with your general point, but I'm too much of a pedant to let an incorrect example slide. Never mind that you could almost certainly cut a deal with Oracle anyway if you speak to them.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[aproposofwhat]

You design a data entry interface in Flash.

It's your own fault - you should have used curses ;o)

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[SecondHand]

I would imagine even Windows can run 32 bit applications batter

I guess you meant: I would imagine even Windows batters 32 bit applications.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[Idaho]

So you're saying that if Flash was FOSS then it would be easier to write a flash player for a different CPU than to write your user interface in a different SDK?

Likely yes, if it's written in C or C++, and seeing as how a GCC port exists for ARM, it may not actually be that much work; even much more likely is that someone else would have already ported it like 5 years ago.

The problem is that now, you don't even have this choice at all; given that you can't get Macromedia^H^H^H^HAdobe interested in writing a port (and let me guess..they probably have better things to do than writing free-as-in-beer Flash clients for your convenience), you're straight out of luck.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[JohnFluxx]

VMWare is an excellent example of where it is difficult to install because it can't be packaged by distros.

Everytime Ubuntu releases a new kernel, VMWare stops working If it was integrated better into the packing system then this wouldn't happen.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[The_reformant]

Both of these examples are somewhat disingenious given that there is not feature comparable open database to Oracle and that you suggested someone would choose flash for developing a data input platform.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[HiThere]

Well, when I first encountered Java 1.0 I was quite enthused, but soon after I switched to Linux, and Java became an annoyance. So I haven't kept up and have used other languages instead.

Now I don't have an investment in Java, and I'm not that interested in it. If I need speed + a garbage collector, I pick D. (This may change. D doesn't have the libraries, and I pick it because of enthusiasm.) If I need garbage collection but not speed, I pick Python. If I need a simple basic program with lots of libraries, I pick C. (I prefer Ruby over Python, but Ruby's slower, and it doesn't have as many libraries for what I need. So I rarely use it.)

Did you notice that Java wasn't on that list? It could have dominated it. Now...it's going to have to come up with a new reason to choose it.

For the future...the next language that I find important should be something that makes it simple to program on multiple processors. Erlang doesn't cut the mustard. There's no reasonable graphics. The language needs to make it reasonably simple to transfer data and other messages between processes running on different processors, but it also can't have any really sizable holes. And it needs to be *fast*. If something needs to run on multiple processors, you can expect speed to be important.

It's hard to see Java playing in this field, but it's possible.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[GuidoW]

64 bit browser?

I thought Solaris userspace (on sparc) was always 32 bit?

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[jhol13]

I guess I did :-)

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

[marsu_k]

Sadly, there's no flash player on ARM O RLY?

Re:For more information

[calebt3]

$GenericNoClickWarning

Re:This is good news...

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, p.s. "Dionysius" is a name given to people named after the god Dionysus/Dionysos.

WARNING LAST MEASURE

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't click!

MySQL

[JayAitch]

So this is to make up for MySQL? They giveth they taketh away.

Re:MySQL

[stoolpigeon]

I guess it is exactly like that since neither has actually happened yet.

Re:MySQL

[$criptah]

You obviously did not read the comments about MySQL posted by MySQL's ex-CEO. They are not taking MySQL away by any means. The core of the product will always be GPL! What they are going to do is to close source some add-ons in order to generate more revenue so they can pay developers who write those things. In other words, if you really want to get some latest gadgets for MySQL, you'll have to pay. That is okay with me. Open Source at its finest :)

Re:MySQL

[kylehase]

While it's much better than close sourcing the whole thing it's still really bad. To quote my previous post from the MySQL thread

Those using the community version won't be able to take advantage of features that could be essential for future applications. The problem is that we don't know what features will become essential in the future.

Here's a hypothetical. Imagine if a hugely popular DB closed the source on any new developments years ago before any ACID features were available. Then ACID features were developed as closed source and only available in the commercial version. Almost any large scale application would require the commercial version. What I'm curious about is why such different stances between the two products. One is heading towards openness while the other is adding more closed features.

Re:MySQL

[tonyr60]

While it's much better than close sourcing the whole thing it's still really bad. To quote my previous post from the MySQL thread

Those using the community version won't be able to take advantage of features that could be essential for future applications. The problem is that we don't know what features will become essential in the future.

Here's a hypothetical. Imagine if a hugely popular DB closed the source on any new developments years ago before any ACID features were available. Then ACID features were developed as closed source and only available in the commercial version. Almost any large scale application would require the commercial version. What I'm curious about is why such different stances between the two products. One is heading towards openness while the other is adding more closed features. Because the stance is not about two products, it is about two companies. MySQL management has made it quite clear that the partial closed source has been their decision. Sun management has made it clear that they are committed to Open Sourcing everything, that they will not screw with the MySQL culture, but have hinted that the partial MySQL closed source may change.

What will happen to GNU Java?

[julie-h]

Will gjc be depricated?

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

[Random BedHead Ed]

You could argue that if Java goes GPL, gcj has been successful even if it suddenly becomes irrelevant. The same would be true of GNU Gnash if Adobe were to GPL the Flash plugin. It wouldn't invalidate the open source efforts: far from it, it would accomplish the original goal of having a free implementation of the application.

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

[julie-h]

I hope you are right! I just fear that GNU would flame any distribution that removes gjc or doesn't make it the default :(

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

[Big Jojo]

I still want to know when the ARM hardware support for Java will have public specs: Jazelle, as found on ARMv5TEJ and ARM6 cores. The ARM926ej-s cores (ARMv5tej) are some of the most widely used ones. ARM6 is found in Nokia N800 series. Until Jazelle specs become available, none of those chips can leverage the hardware support for Java using a GPL'd JVM. They have to buy a JVM from somewhere else. This affects the JVM used with Android, for one example. It increases the runtime footprint of JVMs on embedded hardware ... to the degree that using Java isn't necessarily practical.

And what does this have to do with Sun, you ask? When I ask ARM why they don't make the Jazelle specs public, they say it's because Sun required them to be closed, so that can't change until Sun OKs it.

Of course, I've kind of lost interest in Java, myself; I don't work in areas it matters any more. If Sun hadn't been mismanaging it, I might not have moved away from such areas. Oh well; that's just more water under the bridge.

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

[GuidoW]

Well, gcj produces native machine code, so it's scope is obviously a bit different. The resulting binaries are not very much faster than Java Bytecode, but at least they require a lot less memory.

Also, who ever said the FOSS community can't have two or more different solutions to the same problem?

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

[LDoggg_]

And what does this have to do with Sun, you ask? When I ask ARM why they don't make the Jazelle specs public, they say it's because Sun required them to be closed, so that can't change until Sun OKs it.

That's not exactly the story I've gotten from these guys. Directly from ARM 2 years ago in regard to my many inquires about getting specs for jazelle to build a VM for my nokia 770:

"Enabling Jazelle is something that is done by the Java VM and OS, and ARM have worked with many handset vendors and Java platform vendors to ensure this happens as widely as possible, investing many 10s of man years into the Jazelle software enabling technology. If your device does not already enable Jazelle, I suggest you talk to the vendor about this. Please note, the license between ARM and Sun for Java technology is based on the Sun commercial license and not on a GPL license."

It's greed plain and simple. I wasn't asking them for a Sun JVM, just hardware specs to apply to a small free JVM. It's not good enough that you buy the hardware and want to use what you own. You have to pay them again to actually utilize all the features of the chip.

ARM can go to hell.

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

[Big Jojo]

the license between ARM and Sun for Java technology is based on the Sun commercial license

That confirms that Sun's fingers are in the deal. And the story you got from ARM is not different from what I got from them; in both cases, ARM says it's out of their hands. (Which I happen to think was an apallingly dumb thing for ARM to do, but there were a lot of apallingly dumb things being done with Java in those days.) And when I've asked Sun folk about it, they haven't denied ARM's story.

It's greed plain and simple. I wasn't asking them for a Sun JVM, just hardware specs to apply to a small free JVM.

If some of those hardware specs are controlled by a license from Sun, then ARM's hands are tied unless/until Sun says they can provide them under the usual royalty-free terms applying to all of the non-security system software specs. Of course, since neither of us participated in those licensing discussions (right?) we can only presume that ARM's story is truthful, and in fact Sun does hold them by the short'n'curlies. That presumption may not be correct though; it could have been a business deal structured to get money to both partners.

No matter what the deal actually is, though, if Sun is really opening up Java, the Jazelle stuff should be a part of it. Agreed, I have an Nokia 770 (and various other ARM926ejs systems) that I'd like to have had running Java. You can probably assume that Nokia didn't think Java was valuable enough to pay for the privilege of using Jazelle.

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

[TheRaven64]

I am not completely familiar with the history of Jazelle, but it may include some technology licensed from Sun, who produced the first chips for accelerating Java (not very well). If this is the case, then it may be that Sun get a license fee for every chip where it's used, but waive this for systems running an authorised Sun JVM (so they'd get a fee if it was used to run embedded .NET, for example).

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

[davecb]

Random BedHead Ed wrote

You could argue that if Java goes GPL, gcj has been successful even if it suddenly becomes irrelevant.

Even better, the two compilers can be compared, the better ideas identified and the final compilers can get better. Think of the Multics Emacs in lisp and RMC's evenual rewrite of the TECO emacs in lisp.

--dave

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

[LDoggg_]

I guess what angered me about their response was the stupid comment about the amount of time they invested in it. I understand they didn't build it for free. So what? That doesn't make them unique. I paid them for their work by purchasing the chip. Now let me use it.

The whole situation is ridiculous.

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

[shutdown -p now]

There's no need to have a full-fledged Java compiler for that, really; the proper way to do it is to compile Java bytecode to native.

But even so, you still need a runtime JIT for a fully compliant (or even just "sufficiently compatible") implementation because of required support for dynamic class loading.

Beats OpenSolaris!

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the progress that the OpenJDK project has done in the little time it has had - one has to wonder why OpenSolaris has done so badly. Is it that the GPLv2 plays a role in better adoption? Or is it that the people from within Sun working on the OpenJDK project were more willing and eager to get the source out there (they use Mercurial) and pave the way for community contributions? I suspect it is the latter - judging from Ted Tso's blog post and the couple links it references it sounds like Sun never wanted OpenSolaris to be developed outside of Sun.

One problem with open sourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

One problem is that it creates forks of forks of forks. And pretty soon you have compatability issues and qualification clauses eg: Compatable with IBM Java 1.2.3.4.5 a or RedHat VirtualJ (for other java compatabilities please ensure that you have libXYZ installed) etc and this is where is gets frustrating.
I know that Sun are addressing this issue but I still think that it is inevitable.

Re:One problem with open sourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Just look at what's happened to C, perl and javascript. Oh wait, nothing.

Re:One problem with open sourcing

[larry bagina]

Let's look:

C: GCC is one of the worst offenders for non-standard extensions, but very few compilers are 100% compatible.

Javascript: 4 main implementations (IE, spidermonkey, webkit/kjs, and opera), plenty of small differences in the core language, lots of differences in the DOM/Event support.

PERL: only 1 implementation, never will be standardized, requires a perl parser just to parse the syntax.

Re:One problem with open sourcing

[ttfkam]

You think that C hasn't fragmented? Borland C? Microsoft Visual Studio? Gnu GCC? You really think they are all completely compatible? Do you think that ANSI C, C99, and K&R C are all identical?

ActiveState Perl (for Windows) acts exactly like Perl for Unix? The packages from CPAN are all uniformly available to all implementations of Perl?

JavaScript is uniform between Flash's ActionScript, Microsoft's JScript, the ECMAScript specs, Mozilla's Seamonkey C-based engine, and Mozilla's Java-based Rhino engine?

Seriously? You believe that?

Compared to those others, Java is an absolute dream with regard to consistency. If you disagree, please point out a specific example. Most people who claim the contrary never seem to have actually written in the language and just vomit "wisdom" they learned from ZDNet.

Re:One problem with open sourcing

[tknd]

Compared to those others, Java is an absolute dream with regard to consistency.

The language for a specific Java version might be consistent but the libraries won't be. Between 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 there were/are huge changes in the language and libraries, some which broke some of our applications because they went ahead and deprecated some functionality.

I agree that C and Javascript are also a huge pain to work with between versions but you can't say the same about perl. Perl has maintained an incredible job at being backwards compatible with some pretty ugly code. We've been able to take perl code that was written 6 to 8 years ago under perl 5.5 and dump it on perl 5.8.7 without any changes. Some perl libraries you can get from cpan are only compatible with a certain newer version of perl (usually 5.6) but that's because they probably utilize/need newer features in perl. The same is true for Java where 1.4.2 has things that 1.3 didn't have and 1.5 has things that 1.4 didn't have.

You also mention ActiveState perl which kinda went in their own direction as far as packages and other things. But if you want perl for windows that is closer to perl for nix then you might want to try Strawberry perl. Strawberry perl includes a Mingw C/C++ compiler and a "make" tool so you can use cpan.

Re:One problem with open sourcing

[zippthorne]

Perl has maintained an incredible job at being backwards compatible with some pretty ugly code.

Eventually, everything will be written in Perl. For the same reason that eventually, everyone will speak english (the language perl most tries to appear as): It will absorb elements from all other languages until they are all technically subsets of Perl.

Re:One problem with open sourcing

[east coast]

Three words: Microsoft Virtual Machine.

Re:One problem with open sourcing

[hansamurai]

Between 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 there were/are huge changes in the language and libraries, some which broke some of our applications because they went ahead and deprecated some functionality. We recently upgraded a 2500 class project from 1.4.2 to 1.5. Nothing was broken because of deprecation. Actually, that seems impossible to me since deprecating in Java still allows you to access the method/class, you just get warnings. They did actually remove a method from the String class which took us a whole one minute to track down and replace with a cast. For our thousands of test files we only had one problem.

Re:One problem with open sourcing

[shutdown -p now]

C: GCC is one of the worst offenders for non-standard extensions, but very few compilers are 100% compatible.

GCC is actually more standard-compliant by default (as in, successfully compiles compliant code, and the result works as defined in the standard) than most other C/C++ compilers out there.

High hopes, low expectations

[Anonymous Coward]

This could be fantastic in the long run. Maybe. Perhaps the open source developers can make Java more secure, less resource intensive, and faster than it currently is. Two things that make me crazy when I'm surfing the web are bad Java programming and PDFs. Maybe one of these will be resolved kinda soonish.

Re:High hopes, low expectations

[dintech]

Two things that make me crazy when I'm surfing the web are bad Java programming and PDFs.

You should try this Java PDF Viewer.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Obligatory bash.org link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.bash.org/?338364

What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[jdb2]

Opensource developers have put an enormous effort into the GNU Classpath Projectwhich has almost reached 1.0 status and that aims to be a free implementation of the Java class libraries. Indeed, who can calculate the man-years that have gone into this project? I can't believe it will just up and die when Sun opensources Java. Will we have two diverging implementations or will they merge?

jdb2

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[leenks]

Presumably they'll end up merging over time (one would hope). There are enough 'issues' with both of them that it seems the logical thing to do. That said, maybe everything will change if we ever get a Java3 and things actually get deprecated(!!!)

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[hardburn]

Classpath has been almost reaching 1.0 status for about six years now. I expect to see Wine reach 1.0 first.

An Open Source Java would have been nice 10 years ago, back when somebody still cared.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[chopper749]

But wait! Wine 1.0 is coming soon! http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleasePlan

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[mark-t]

They skipped Java 3 and 4.... they are on Java 6 now.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[hardburn]

And if you look at the end of that page, there's a link to a PC World story about the upcoming Wine 1.0. Written in 2002.

I don't want to sound like I'm just harping on the Wine guys, though. The Windows API is often poorly documented even when Microsoft isn't changing a function to do something completely different in their new release. Considering that, Wine is quite a piece of work.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[LizardKing]

Having poked through chunks of both the Sun JDK source and the Classpath source, I wouldn't trust the latter in a production environment. Sun has released some crufty stuff (JAI for instance), but Classpath is horrible pretty much across the board.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenJDK already contains source pieces from the GNU CP

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[setagllib]

They're already merging in the form of IcedTea. However, this will be mostly unecessary when the full class library is opened.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[fm6]

GNU Classpath has been at it for nine years. That's a long time to get to 1.0. And even 1.0 doesn't target the complete Java 6 library (no javax packages). I'm afraid that the disappearance of Classpath rates a big "who cares?"

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed 1.3 and 1.4 didn't you? 1.5 became 5, and 6 well that just is a number++;

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[mark-t]

1.3 and 1.4 were both Java2.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[petermgreen]

Recently the classpath guys seem to have been working mainly on hacking thier code into a form where it can be used to fill the holes in suns source releases. Some of that code may eventually be merged into suns tree but this is complicated by the fact that sun requires authors of code to sign a "contributor agreement" giving sun a load of rights to thier code.

My guess is that most of the alternate java implementations will gradually fade into insignificance as sun java is freed up and ported to more platforms. Some alternate VMs may retain a niche on platforms where sun doesn't have a JIT.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[Anonymous Coward]

Classpath has been almost reaching 1.0 status for about six years now.

So that's what's been holding up Duke Nukem ...

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure hope not. Having classpath and gcj as a part of gcc makes life a LOT easier and it would be wonderful if they, at the very least, kept it as a bootstrap platform for Sun's Java.

The advantage of using gcj+classpath as a bootstrap platform is that it's available on many platforms and that it's easy to cross-compile. With gcj around Sun's java could piggy-back on gcc's portability. In addition, gcj could be used for development of smaller, less complicated java applications without the overhead of Sun's full blown JDK.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[quantaman]

I know a number of gcj and classpath developers and recall when the code for OpenJDK first came out. The general vibe I got is they were quite happy with the scenario of gcj and classpath falling away and everyone uniting behind a single open source version of Sun's JVM. There's not a lot of people who will dedicate years of their life to a project, then happily toss it aside when a better solution becomes available. I really respect them for that.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU Classpath will either die or play catch up forever. The real work nowadays is being done in JSR's, which will integrate within the Java framework when they are accepted and have been finished. I admit it's a bit of a shame if/when it's gone.

On the other hand, it might be worth a look to see if GNU Classpath does things better than the JDK on some fronts, and integrate that back into the JDK.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[Anonymous Coward]

They joined forces with OpenJDK to give you some IcedTea http://icedtea.classpath.org/ that is the birthplace of many of the encumbrance removing. It bootstraps openjdk using gcj/classpath and replaces the still non-free blobs with code from GNU Classpath and adds a appletviewer - gcjwebplugin - and java webstart - netx - support.

Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

[leenks]

As was 1.5 / 5.0 - it is only 6.0 that change from J2SE to Java SE

What,

[Trogre]

again?

Re:What,

[johnsonjii]

Now, if we could just get them to do it to MySQL...

Denix

[dnix]

that's simply another clear intention of IT giants to exploit open source community! they opensource it only because they are realizing java is dieing! Look at this: http://www.news.com/IT-giants-accused-of-exploiting-open-source/2100-7344_3-5726714.html

Re:Denix

[thetoadwarrior]

I don't think Java is dying. It has more competition, sure, so it's not going to be some sort of monolithic entity.

It's also not the easiest language to learn compared to some and that means a lot of people may pass over it. So as more people get into programming they may go else where.

Java has done well and will continue as it's gets itself sorted out on the J2EE side which is a bit weak as there are far too many options and some require writing extra code just to get things to work together.

Re:For more information

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd think that in a Java article, throw new GenericNoClickWarningException(); would be more appropriate. :-)

Re:For more information

[calebt3]

Meh, I am a programming n00b.

Millions of Voices

[turgid]

Blah blah blah, disturbance in the Force, blah blah like millions of slashbots (and IBM and Microsoft astroturfers) heads assplode.

open source vs license questions

[drDugan]

While open source is good, the real issue is the license. The only mention in the article is some parts were not compatible with GPL(I assume v2). What will the license be for OpenJDK? Looking here (http://freejdk.org/faqs/openjdk_license.html) and here (http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html) it looks interesting...

Does this mean the Classpath exceptions will be removed? Not clear. Kind of a problem for some if it is removed.

FTA: "Once Java is 100 percent open source, it can be shipped as part of Linux, Sands said. Ubuntu has distributed Java as separately available commercial software, he noted. But once Java is fully open source, it can be offered as part of the free Ubuntu distribution and other Linux variants, Sands said."

For me, and I assume most people interested in open development platforms - the real question about using Java will be around the license (once it is open source) and what that means in terms of success, options, and longevity for the projects we build.

Re:open source vs license questions

[bigstrat2003]

They won't use the GPL, then? Seems like a reasonable solution to me, and there are tons of other licenses to choose from.

For that matter, why the hell would they choose the GPL in the first place? Wouldn't that mean that anyone who uses the official Java class libraries has to make their software GPL?

Re:open source vs license questions

[Anonymous Coward]

The license for the open source pieces have been GPLv2 + classpath for the past couple of years now.
http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/faq.jsp#g1

Re:open source vs license questions

[petermgreen]

I don't think this article really means anything significant.

Status right now is that the bulk of the JDK is released under GPL+classpath exception but there are some bits missing (icedtea has hacked together replacements for some of them and stubbed out the rest to give a free buildable version). I don't see any indications that they plan to change that license.

Sun is slowly working to get the complete JDK free by a mixture of negotiating with copyright holders and replacing code. How long it will take them to finish that work (and whether they lose interest in opensource before finishing it) is anyones guess.

well, yes, except...

[nguy]

It's fully open sourced, but it's also dual licensed. That means that Sun will still try to call the shots and set the direction for Java development, and that means that the numerous problems in Java won't get fixed.

But it doesn't matter anymore anyway. Java is what it is at this point, and it's not going to get any better, only more bloated. You either love it or you hate it.

Re:well, yes, except...

[mark-t]

You mention Java having "numerous problems".. Not that I doubt there are numerous problems with it, but what specific ones did you have in mind?

Re:well, yes, except...

[rcallan]

Generally things grow with time, and for most people using java I think it would be hard to argue the recent changes make the language worse (compare code from 1.4.1 to 1.5 and 1.6). I think Sun has done about as well as they could have in terms of choosing and implementing JSRs, I would argue they've done a better job than if it was done by a straight democracy of the parties involved.

Re:well, yes, except...

[Samah]

Are you talking about the syntax changing or the API?
Apart from some new things like generics and enumerations (god knows why they weren't in 1.0), it's only really the API that's changed. For the most part it's redesigning things the way they should have been designed in the first place (such as the Collections API which came in with 1.1 I believe), or adding new APIs to the core download such as XML parsing, regular expressions/patterns, extensions to Swing, etc.
Can you give some examples of ways the language has changed? I may have missed something.

So?

[sega01]

Good for the open source community and Java itself, but I don't think the language is worth being free due to the time wasted using it, and additional eyestrain.

Java vs. Python?

[turgid]

Please explain what Java and Python have in common other than the fact that they are languages and one is also a platform?

Re:Java vs. Python?

[Just Some Guy]

You can write cross-platform backend and user interface code with both, both of them run on Windows and Unix, and both support OOP. That made those languages pretty reasonable choices for our needs.

Re:Java vs. Python?

[turgid]

What are the pros and cons of each when you have to interface with another language or platform?

How do you deal with code written in C++ and PERL, for example? And, for a couple of years, Ruby has been a buzzword.

Re:Java vs. Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

Java's FFI is atrocious. Python slaughters Java in that respect.

Re:Java vs. Python?

[petermgreen]

I have never used python so I can't comment there.

Javas interface to native code is horrible. You have to create a java class with methods declared native and compile it. Then you have to seperately write and compile a peice of C code that uses obtuse apis to access the java data and pass it to the native library. And of course you have to seperately compile this code for every platform even if the interface to the native library is the same.

Re:Java vs. Python?

[Rayban]

While core Java doesn't have a good native interface, the JNA project basically solves that:

https://jna.dev.java.net/

Re:Java vs. Python?

[mhall119]

Please explain what Java and Python have in common other than the fact that they are languages and one is also a platform?

The both run on the JVM.

Re:Sun's source code

[wild_quinine]

Now if only we could have the Sun's source code to modify the Sun and fix global warming...

No good, you wouldn't be able to see it when doing a nightly build.

Meltdown!

[nlightnmnt]

I celebrated by attempting to launch 3 Java programs simultaneously.

16-core processors can't arrive soon enough..

Re:Meltdown!

[forgotten_my_nick]

I thought this site was for technical people? If this was year 2000 I would probably find the comment funny. Now it's just annoying fud.

Re:Meltdown!

[Anonymous Coward]

The JVM is really fast once it gets running, but its memory usage and startup time is still horrible.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Can't download anything from SUN.COM right now!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it impossible to download anything from Sun's website right now?

I always get a "General Error"...

Java trap is ended for this software.

[jbn-o]

I run only free software on my computers, so Sun's implementation of Java software was unavailable to me. I used other Java software as needed but I largely simply did without Java. The Java Trap has ended for this software (similar non-free dependency traps exist for other software). I think what Sun is doing is a fine thing and I look forward to trying Sun's newly liberated Java software.

Re:Java trap is ended for this software.

[tepples]

I run only free software on my computers Has your experience with coreboot gone smoothly? Or do you still run proprietary software every time the power fails? And what do you do when you want to play a game?

Re:Java trap is ended for this software.

[jbn-o]

My main computer predates those that can run Coreboot, I look forward to purchasing a computer that can run Coreboot next time I buy a computer. I don't want to get rid of it until it is incapable of running at all. I understand and respect that progress of all kinds proceeds slowly, improving over time. So I'm not going to deny myself the use of a computer until things are such that I can run only a free software machine (GNU, an OS born out of a pursuit of freedom, would be nowhere near where it is had hackers done that). However I will only install a completely free OS on it with free software to do my work. Games are not a big part of my computing, but I enjoy some bzflag, Mahjong, and card games once in a while. I might pick up some word games later on.

Re:Fuck you Sun. (Was: Re:Kudos to them, I guess)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you probably think I'm kidding. No, I think you're crazy.

Re:Java and Open Source

[SiriusStarr]

The fact that yours was also modded "Redundant" got a laugh out of me...

Backwash

[spywhere]

Does this mean Microsoft will again be able to provide their Java virtual machine?
http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=msjavavm
I'm getting tired of stripping [this week's version of] Sun Java off new PCs and installing the M$ VM, but it's necessary to get them running right (and to get rid of the coffee-cup "automatic update" marketing crapola).

Re:Backwash

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're really doing your customers a disservice by putting that putrid, outdated, and unsupported POS jvm on their machines. It probably doesn't even work for the majority of java apps that are out there now.

Re:Backwash

[petermgreen]

no it won't, firstly microsofts code is based on a very old version of java, forward porting it and making sure it was clean of encumbered sun code would be a nightmare. Secondly MS would have to release code under the GPL to do that which I very much doubt they would want to do.

If you are installing the MSJVM without a very good reason then IMO you should be fired. If you absoloutely have to install it you should be very carefull to make sure untrusted code isn't run on it as it no longer gets security support.

Re:Backwash

[kaffiene]

You fucking moron

Never cared

[diegocgteleline.es]

I've never installed Java in my box, and I've never needed it...I must live in a different internet.

Re:Never cared

[mdm42]

Ah, so you're the one person who hit my site without Java enabled...

Re:Java and Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that yours was also modded "Redundant" got a laugh out of me..

Recursive

[c0d3r]

Do they have a recursive mod?

It incrementally simplified my life...

[dbc]

.. because I could safely ignore the language until such day as it became relevant. As to the future, now the language has a chance to prosper, if it can catch up.

Deployment issues

[FranTaylor]

It's much easier to package an application when you know that there's a real Sun java implementation available as /usr/bin/java on multiple platforms.

Until now we have had to rely on the user downloading the correct JDK and installing it in the correct place.

Will this mean a 64-bit plugin sooner?

[Slim Backwater]

Great! Does that mean we might see a 64-bit plug sooner rather than later? We've been waiting over 5 years!

Re:Will this mean a 64-bit plugin sooner?

[piojo]

Great! Does that mean we might see a 64-bit plug sooner rather than later? We've been waiting over 5 years! And hopefully a java web start (javaws) executable included in the 64-bit builds.

Re:Will this mean a 64-bit plugin sooner?

[AnObfuscator]

IcedTea works pretty well on my X64 Debian system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IcedTea

I still have a Sun 1.6 JDK installed, which I use for all my development work; however, IcedTea is my default JRE, and I've not had any issues so far. It's eased my need for a Java plugin. no more 32bit firefox^W Iceweasel for me!

Re:Will this mean a 64-bit plugin sooner?

[billtom]

Great! Does that mean we might see a 64-bit plug sooner rather than later? We've been waiting over 5 years! Unfortunately, no. Now that it is open source, Sun gets to legitimately use that old open source excuse: "hey, it's open source, if you want a new feature, here's the code, you do it."

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm growing tired of always hearing people making fun of Java, and praising Javascript, Ruby, of even the .NET over-expanding galaxy. It was funny, say 5 years ago, but it's not anymore.

Sun to Fully Open Source Java

[Anonymous Coward]

blah

A simple question

[UseCase]

From the Article, "OpenJDK is based on Java Platform, Standard Edition (SE) 6".

I am wondering whether the Java SE line and the OpenJDK will be updated and serviced by Sun concurrently, new versions, etc? Is the OpenJDK completely detached from SE developing and growing on its own accord without Sun influences, or does it replace SE completely?

Re:A simple question

[petermgreen]

This is a pretty shitty article.

For most of it's life the openjdk project was releasing stuff based on java 7 alphas. Recently they have released stuff from the java 6 code tree as well.

I think the long term plan is that the openjdk tree will become the main java source tree that the public releases of JAVA SE are built off but that is some way off yet.

Java Fork!

[Anonymous Coward]

How long till we see Java Fork?

m3g

[edxwelch]

There's quite a lot of stuff still not open sourced, for instance m3g, aka jsr-184

Browser Plugin

[WarJolt]

I know java is more than just a browser plugin, but maybe now finally I can run Java with my 64-bit browser.

Re:Browser Plugin

[JAlexoi]

And hope that Adobe will finally realize that there are a LOT of 64bit system out there :)

Re:Browser Plugin

[WarJolt]

I use nspluginwrapper, but it would be nice not to take the performance hit.

Re:Java and Open Source

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

The fact that mine may be modded "Redundant" makes me a little sad inside.

Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[DraconPern]

How many times have I read that Sun is open sourcing java already? So has it happend? May be we should bet on how many more PR they can generate with the word 'Java' and 'Open Source' together....

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[cowwoc2001]

Java has been open-source for over 10 years now. Open-source fanatics would have you believe otherwise. No one is able to please *everyone* in the open-source community (nor should they try).

Sun has open-sourced a lot more products than any other company in recent history. They got *some* thanks from the community but they also got a lot of whiners asking for more. You give someone a finger and he wants your entire hand. Go figure.

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[petermgreen]

So has it happend?
The bulk of the code is released but there are still a number of encumbered components. For each encumbered component either the copyright holders need to be negotiated with or the code has to be replaced with a cleanroom implementation.

Third parties have hacked together a rough but usable version based on the code sun has released and bits from gnu classpath but getting high quality replacements and replacements for less popular parts and getting them integrated into suns tree (sun insists that authors of code in thier tree sign a contributor agreement which gives sun certain rights to use the code in propietry stuff) takes time.

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[quantaman]

Java has been open-source for over 10 years now. Open-source fanatics would have you believe otherwise. No one is able to please *everyone* in the open-source community (nor should they try). What definition of open source has Sun's Java fulfilled for 10 years?

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[laffer1]

The one where you can see the source code! The GP said open source, not FOSS. Remember, most open source software has some form of strings attached as part of the license. Sometimes you have to provide code freedom, other times you have keep comments about who wrote the software, and still other times you can't use it at all but only look at it.

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[cowwoc2001]

The source code has been open to the public for over 10 years. This includes the Java, C and ASM source code.

The license prevented anyone from distributing forked code but it *was* freely available to the public. Nothing prevented anyone from auditing the code or patching it for internal use so long as they didn't redistribute their changes to the general public and call it "Java". As a result, Java was already enjoying the vast majority of the benefits associated with open-source with free of its risks.

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[quantaman]

The one where you can see the source code! The GP said open source, not FOSS.

Remember, most open source software has some form of strings attached as part of the license. Sometimes you have to provide code freedom, other times you have keep comments about who wrote the software, and still other times you can't use it at all but only look at it. That would be having the source available, which isn't completely bad, but is a far ways short from being open source.

Open source has an actual definition, even if you don't accept their precise terms that definition it is still pretty close to what most people consider to be open source and a far cry from what Java has had for 10 years.

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[quantaman]

The source code has been open to the public for over 10 years. This includes the Java, C and ASM source code.

The license prevented anyone from distributing forked code but it *was* freely available to the public. Nothing prevented anyone from auditing the code or patching it for internal use so long as they didn't redistribute their changes to the general public and call it "Java". As a result, Java was already enjoying the vast majority of the benefits associated with open-source with free of its risks. Except the ones like distros being able to distribute their own versions of the jvm and take over the task of properly configuring java packages for their own systems instead of having sun try to properly package java for a zillion different linux systems.

There are very practical advantages to allowing re-distribution and I'd bet we see a lot more java on the linux desktop if they had.

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[cowwoc2001]

As a result, Java was already enjoying the vast majority of the benefits associated with open-source with free of its risks. Except the ones like distros being able to distribute their own versions of the jvm and take over the task of properly configuring java packages for their own systems instead of having sun try to properly package java for a zillion different linux systems.

There are very practical advantages to allowing re-distribution and I'd bet we see a lot more java on the linux desktop if they had. Fair enough, but that's what Sun preferred ten years ago, as was their right. My point is that this was a far cry from Java being closed-source as slashdot posters like to imply.

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[quantaman]

As a result, Java was already enjoying the vast majority of the benefits associated with open-source with free of its risks. Except the ones like distros being able to distribute their own versions of the jvm and take over the task of properly configuring java packages for their own systems instead of having sun try to properly package java for a zillion different linux systems.

There are very practical advantages to allowing re-distribution and I'd bet we see a lot more java on the linux desktop if they had. Fair enough, but that's what Sun preferred ten years ago, as was their right. My point is that this was a far cry from Java being closed-source as slashdot posters like to imply. They were completely in their right to do so, and they are dealing with the consequences, both good and bad, of the choice they made.

I think the term for Sun's former Java situation should be something like "source available" for the "look but don't touch" license conditions. However, left with the choice between open and closed source I'd definitely label it as closed source.

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[cowwoc2001]

I think the term for Sun's former Java situation should be something like "source available" for the "look but don't touch" license conditions. However, left with the choice between open and closed source I'd definitely label it as closed source. They should just renamed open-source to community-source because frankly their choice of names has been rather poor ;) First they hijacked the word "free", now they are hijacking the word "open". Granted "open" (as in "transparent") is much closer to what they mean but "community" would have been far clearer in my opinion.

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[Anonymous Coward]

Even Wikipedia's article on open source is careful about pointing out there is more than one definition.

You need to realize not everyone agrees with you on the definition. There is nothing wrong with the OSI version, but I feel like the phrase "open source" has been hijacked. It originally meant you could see the source code.

Re:Let's bet on how many PR they can generate!

[quantaman]

Even Wikipedia's article on open source is careful about pointing out there is more than one definition.

As was I, there are various definitions but the differences are small and rarely significant, and Sun's old Java license fulfills none of them.

You need to realize not everyone agrees with you on the definition. There is nothing wrong with the OSI version, but I feel like the phrase "open source" has been hijacked. It originally meant you could see the source code. Actually when the term "open source" was created they tried to trademark it so it couldn't be hijacked and diluted. It has never meant you could just see the source code, freedom to modify and redistribute has always been an essential part of any open source definition.

Dot NET must be winning

[Anonymous Coward]

Dot NET must have higher market share than Java by now.

It's all too late

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all too late, really. A few years ago I was a java fan (still am to an extent) but this should have happened years ago. Now it just reminds me of the time my girlfriend's grandmother gave me a rather scary grin and told me she was wearing stockings and suspenders.

Re:This is good news...

[petermgreen]

It is good news for users of java on linux.

Major distros will ship proper java by default (some already are shipping java builds based on the code sun has released so far with bits from elsewhere to try and plug the gaps) and they will be able to patch it themselves to backport security fixes or fix issues with new versions of libraries (there was a bad one involving sun java 6 and a new version of some library recently, I don't remember the details but I do remember sun took ages to get a fix out).

Java?

[bunhed]

... oh yeah... java... i remember that language. I guess it's good they open sourced it so museums can put it on display without any licensing issues. ;)

Re:Java?

[gangien]

i'm not sure people are that interested in the open sourcing of the language, as much as the open sourcing of the jvm.

ANd yes i know you were trying to be funny.

Re:Java?

[aled]

You mean because Java is the language in which enterprise applications, cellphone games and HD Blu-ray discs are programmed then its success should be put on display?

Thank god. Kill GCJ.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this begins the end of the GCJ effort. I'm sick and tired of landing on machines, and finding out only when things begin to go horribly wrong that GCJ is installed, not the Sun JDK. GCJ will have no reason to continue, and should be shelved as soon as the Sun JDK is officially open source.

As if gettting Java to work wasn't hard enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we have to compile it first.

Misquote?

[kylehase]

I think the summary has a misquote. It should read "Sun wants Java to be easily available for use in Linux distributions but we want new MySQL features to be unavailable."

Re:For more information

[AmaDaden]

If your gonna troll slashdot you should at least make your terrible terrible links work on linux. Your windows opened up nothing and just kept generating errors.

AMD64 users rejoice

[LaurensVH]

Everything on AMD64 works fine expect for a few fiddly bits that just don't work reliably:

1. Flash plugin
2. Java plugin
3. WMV HD movie audio (wma9dmo)

Those are the only few I can come up with at the moment... Lets hope (2) gets fixed soon!

Time to rediscover gardening...

[Max Littlemore]

I installed ejabberd, an Erlang-based Jabber server on FreeBSD this week from ports.

I understood that as soon as I read it.

No more computer for at least a month.

Re:Fuck you Sun. (Was: Re:Kudos to them, I guess)

[Anonymous Coward]

I see Sun infecting MySQL, as it infected Gnome and Mozilla and so on (cough SCO-case cough). Based on what? I'm a former MySQL employee now working (post-acquisition) for Sun's DB Technology Group, and this is not what I'm seeing at all. If anything, the "infection" seems to be getting transmitted in the other direction.

As for Gnome, what has Sun got to do with them? If anyone's "infecting" Gnome, it's Novell and Mono. (Aside from the fact that I think it's a shitty interface, I'm singularly unimpressed with the effort to make Linux desktops and APIs more like Windows. If I liked the Windows desktop, I'd use the bloody thing.) As for Mozilla - what on Earth are you talking about?

Conclusion: Parent is a nutjob and/or a troll and/or just plain ignorant.

And my life is going just great, thanks!

Who cares?

[Henkc]

Call me an ol' timer, but who gives a flying turd about Java? IT managers or other morons who get a boner from New! Improved! buzzwords (like Web 2.0)?

I've yet to encounter a shop where it's an integral part of development or product. Whenever I land on a site which uses it, things slow down while it downloads the silly code, etc. Worse than flash (which I just block).

...and what's with the huge fucking memory footprint? I don't know what it's current memory requirements are, but there's something about a 40MB friggen jvm floating around eating resources that make my balls ache.

Seems anything Sun works on is a greedy resource sob. OpenOffice is great, but for shit sakes, it's slower than my grandmother with two broken hips and chews memory like it's fritos.

Anyway, I'm off to get my morning tea...

m/walks off in a huff/

Re:Who cares?

[thsths]

> Seems anything Sun works on is a greedy resource sob. OpenOffice is great, but for shit sakes, it's slower than my grandmother with two broken hips and chews memory like it's fritos.

Actually I think that is again because of Java. At some point Sun decided to do all the fancy GUI and dialogues in Java, and ever since OO is slow as molasses.

Of course my main grievance is that there is still no 64bit browser plug-in. Hey, my first 64bit PC is rapidly approaching obsolescence, and Sun still does not support it? (Of course SPARC64 CPUs are already mostly history, and I used those, too.)

Get those Gentoo users to help...

[argent]

Maybe all those Gentoo users will start getting down and dirty with Java now they can recompile it every boot.

900 standards to go

[heroine]

With the audio & SNMP standards just around the corner, that gives them 900 more standards to go before the implementations actually do what the language is defined to do.

Re:This is good news...

[Chief Camel Breeder]

It is good news for distributors of java application, like my project. To date, most JREs bundled with Linux won't run our code as they aren't complete implementations.

but then they chose python

[Trepidity]

If you wanted to find a language that'd make Java a speed demon, congratulations.

Re:but then they chose python

[HiThere]

It all depends on what you're doing. For some purposes Ruby is the correct choice, and it's significantly slower than Python.

Re:Thank god. Kill GCJ.

[m50d]

Yeah, just like GTK was shelved as soon as Qt became open source. Oh wait.

It might be nice, but I can't see it happening.

Re:Sun's source code

[aproposofwhat]

So compiling on Gentoo would lead to a nuclear winter?

Classpath, GPLv2 Only and GPLv3

[agbinfo]

The comment you replied to and your answer raises a question. What if I have an application with a BSD like license and I want to use a GPLv2 only library and a GPLv3 library? Would that be legal?

My BSD like application links with Classpath which is fine. It also links with GPLv2 only code which is also fine and it links with GPLv3 code which is also fine if we take it all separately.

Assuming that only my code (or the Classpath code) calls the GPLv2 code and the GPLv3 code directly, can I claim that the GPLv2 only code doesn't link with the GPLv3 code?

Re:Classpath, GPLv2 Only and GPLv3

[notamisfit]

GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible, Classpath linking exception or not. As far as your example, the FSF has claimed in the past that dodges like that do not get around the issue (ie, non-free Qt linking with LGPL'd kdelibs linking with GPL'd apps). Not sure if it would hold up in court, though.

Re:Classpath, GPLv2 Only and GPLv3

[agbinfo]

Thanks. I re-read my comment. Don't know what I was smoking but it must have been some good stuff because at the time I wrote it, I actually thought I was making sense.

Re:Thank god. Kill GCJ.

[shutdown -p now]

GCJ has one thing going for it, and that's it's ability to interoperate with (properly written) C++ classes directly. It's so much more convenient than JNI, on the C++ side of things...

Great!

[crhylove]

Now wake me up when Java stops sucking the life out of all my windows boxes, so I actually bother to install it. Until then, any java take is remaining solely in the "not on my machine!" category.

Re:

[clint999]

Yep, they have amazing hardware at *excellent* prices, too.I don't give a damn for solaris or any sun software but their xfire seriesis the best bang for buck you can buy these days.

An explosion, Really?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

There are already 3-4 programs for just about every niche in the linux desktop. Do you really think many of those would benefit from being rewritten in Java? Do you really think the license of Java really caused people to not write apps in it?

Re:An explosion, Really?

[David Gerard]

Existing programs in a niche never stopped people doing their own. Java being under a proper free licence will (a) attract open source programmers to it who never used it before (b) see a lot of free-licenced Java code going into distros where people will work on it. There's really quite a lot of useful Java things you don't hear much of in free software circles because of the not-yet-free licence on Java.

Developers like Java, just as they like .NET, because it lets you quickly lash together something that almost works. A proper free licence means actually useful things will get free software programmers wanting to work on that last 10% (which is really the last 90%, but anyway).

Re:An explosion, Really?

[Just Some Guy]

Do you really think the license of Java really caused people to not write apps in it?

I don't know about Java specifically, but there's certainly precedent. A lot of people are (justifiably) avoiding C#/Mono right now exactly because of such issues. Now, I think Sun has always been much less likely to put the smackdown on developers than Microsoft has been, but I could understand people being skittish.

Even if I don't really care for Java, I'm glad to see it being opened for that reason. It allows our community to welcome in another big talent pool, and that's always a good thing.

What fate awaits Apache Harmony?

[Noble Kiwi]

Harmony is another JDK replacement that has taken a lot of work and has achieved very high quality. Is there any point in Harmony still existing?