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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.
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?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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!
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.
jdb2
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.
again?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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.
No good, you wouldn't be able to see it when doing a nightly build.
Great! Does that mean we might see a 64-bit plug sooner rather than later? We've been waiting over 5 years!
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.
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I know java is more than just a browser plugin, but maybe now finally I can run Java with my 64-bit browser.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If those people moved to Google, can we then expect Google to become mired in similar internal issues?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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
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.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
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 :)
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).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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 ofDid we forget about this?
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)