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

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

[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: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.

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: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

[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.

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:Better late than early

[fbjon]

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