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Sun's Java Will Be Free This Year
Ian Whyde notes that Sun is finally coming to the end of its struggle to open up Java completely. Simon Phipps, the chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems, said: "There were a couple of holdouts there. One was the area to do with raster graphics and 2D graphics. That turned out to be owned by a company that didn't want us to release that code as open source. We negotiated with them and because they've said 'yes, you can open source the code'... The only element that's left now is actually a sound-related component within Java. We finally decided that the vendor that's involved there just isn't going to play ball and we're rewriting the code from scratch. That's going to be done within the next couple of months." In another sense the milestone of a free Java was reached this week when IcedTea passed the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit.
Once the GPL version is out there it's out there, having a closed source licence version won't stop that.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Sun wants to retain the dual licensing model for now (see above) and thus they cannot just use GPL'd code just yet. On the bright side they can change the license now at wish and can make Java GPLv3 or BSD any time they want.
Exactly - as soon as Sun put code in to it (i.e. the start) they had rights on it in terms of having control over people re-licensing it. Now that it's GPLed then Sun can do whatever they want, but the GPL version is still out there and free for people to take and modify.
Dual licensing means that Sun still has special rights
If Sun has copyright, they have special rights regardless of how many licenses they release Java under.
Frankly, if Java's released under a free license, its irrelevant what other licenses you use with it.
(is perl less free because of dual licensing? KDE?)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
there are volunteers who have been working on this for some time here .0 is based on!
which is what JDK 7
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Java has had 64-bit support for a very long time.
The only thing they haven't provided is a 64-bit web browser plugin. (And believe it or not, these days applets are probably the vast minority of where Java is actually used.)
I'm pretty sure it's not a quote but an attempt to be funny. Altough the mods (and you) seems to have missed the point ;).
Who said it was 'deeply woven into the language'?
You do realise that we're talking about the entire API? A GPL Java interpreter/compiler is (and has been proved to be) trivial to implement.
You should seriously consider installing noscript into your browser. Set it to allow first party scripts and block 3rd party scripts. 99.44% of all ads are GONE, and browser performance will greatly enhanced.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Do you guys and gals remember when Richard did a short stint in a video for Sun following the announcement that Sun had decided to GPL Java ?
I can only imagine how happy Richard was on that day. He had every reason to be so. Not simply because Sun had chosen to use his license for Java-but rather because of a little bit of historical trivia that most Free Software users are too young to remember.
Now surely you know the name James Gosling. He was the one who created Java. But did you know that there is a rather interesting relationship between him and Richard ?
One of the single biggest reasons that Richard wrote the GPL and created what we now know as Free Software has everything to do with James Gosling.
"In the early years (1984 to 1988), the GNU Project did not have a single license to cover all its software. What led Stallman to the creation of this copyleft license was his experience with James Gosling, creator of NeWs and the Java programming language, and UniPress, over Emacs. While Stallman created the first Emacs in 1975, Gosling wrote the first C-based Emacs (Gosling Emacs) running on Unix in 1982. Gosling initally allowed free distribution of the Gosling Emacs source code, which Stallman used in early 1985 in the first version (15.34) of GNU Emacs. Gosling later sold rights to Gosling Emacs to UniPress, and Gosling Emacs became UniPress Emacs. UniPress threatened Stallman to stop distributing the Gosling source code, and Stallman was forced to comply. He later replace these parts with his own code. (Emacs version 16.56). (See the Emacs Timeline) To prevent free code from being proprietarized in this manner in the future, Stallman invented the GPL."
http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/Many people who are ignorant of this history have always been affronted by Stallman's use of the phrase "Java Trap". But is it really any wonder that Richard chose to use that expression-given what personally had transpired between him and James Gosling.
Bill Joy was the cofounder of Sun Microsystems. He is also the guy who originally wrote Vi. Bill Joy was also friends with James Gosling- and made Gosling's baby practically synonymous with the name Sun.
This little bit of trivia adds a whole lot to all of the flamefests over the years about Emacs vs. Vi. SunOS, which we now know as OpenSolaris, was the first heavily commercialized version of what we now know as BSD. Bill Joy used the code written at Berkley to create the original SunOS.
That Java is now GPL is nothing less than Sun saying to Richard-"Richard, you were right". And if one day OpenSolaris embraces the GPL Richard's victory will be complete.
You may think this is nothing but propaganda-but I encourage you to actually *learn* about the history of these giants of the computer world.
Now that the OpenJDK is %100 Free, %100 GPL, Richard has received the kind of vindication that hardly *anyone* in life ever gets. Cheers to you Richard and Cheers to Sun for seeing the light.
The fact that they can just rewrite it means that it isn't deeply woven into the language. What they are doing, is writing a new library against the same API, so that they can open source it. They could probably release a version of the JDK without those parts of the API, and a lot of would not notice, because very few apps make use of those APIs. Especially in the server realm, where Java is most popular. Methinks you don't know what you're talking about, because this isn't a major problem. They are easily getting around the other company's pigheadedness, of refusing to release the source, by just rewriting that part of the code. It's really quite simple.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The majority of Java jobs that I see posted are for work that isn't distributed. Intranet web applications, internally developed web applications, etc. Everything that I have done in the past five years has been either web applications that are solely for the use of the employer, or that are used to add value to some existing service that is offered to business customers.
Also, supposedly Java is big in the mobile phone type electronics space, but I don't have any experience with that - maybe somebody else could provide some information on that.
unfortunately one thing that sun has not opensourced yet is the java plugin. So icedtea are using a plugin based gcjwebplugin. Unfortunately this plugin does not support all the features that the sun plugin does :(
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The vast majority of Java coding is in Enterprise Middleware - e.g. trading systems, payment engines, SOA, eCommerce middleware, messaging buses, ERP, etc. typically run on JBoss, BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere and Oracle OC4J. These are often part of larger SOA offerings such as: BEA Aqualogic, Oracle Fusion, JBoss/RedHat SOA platform - all are Java based.
The large finance orgs where I work have 100's, perhaps 1000's of java people for every C++ person.
You'd find that most designers/architects would not normally spec java as a front end technology and would *extremely rarely* spec C++ for middleware. For a time in the 90's, C++ middleware nearly took off using containers from folks like IONA - but I've not seen an enterprise middleware container for C++ for a while now thats anything like the spec of a J2EE container - with the exception of microsoft's .net framework that can use C# - which is probably more akin to java than C++.
It's a minor problem in that it's simple to solve. It only takes several months, because it requries rewriting, from scratch, a sizeable portion of the code. That requires a lot of time for not only writing the code, but testing and quality control, to ensure it works as it is supposed to.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"Funny" doesn't give you karma, but "Interesting" does. Someone was throwing you a bone for being funny, but had to work around Slashdot's broken moderation system.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The downside, however, is there is a performance hit and a single process cannot use more than 4GB.
You're saying the right things but for the wrong reasons. To wit:
- Most PC's can't handle above 4GB of RAM (not 3GB) because of limitations of the x86 architecture. Intel created Physical Address Extension (PAE) technology to extend this up to (I believe) 8GB, but it's a kludgy patch on an ancient architecture. x64 technology bypasses both of these limits and gives you access to (theoretically) 16 exabytes of RAM. Both Intel and AMD support less than this, but they still support far more than a terabyte of RAM.
- Some 32-bit operating systems for x86 architectures have difficulty supporting more than 3GB of RAM, particularly Windows. This is due to how the OS segments memory for applications versus the OS itself. 64-bit Windows (XP64, 2003 x64, Vista x64) has no such limitation.
- The idea that 64-bit is always faster than 32-bit is a fallacy. 64-bit can be faster than 32-bit if the application was using data structures larger than 32-bit to begin with. Outside of the scientific, simulation, and digital content creation community, such usage is exceedingly rare. In fact, 64-bit can be slower than 32-bit due to how the CPU caches data. 64-bit values take up more room in the cache than 32-bit. If the values don't need to be 64-bit, you're wasting cache space. Worst-case scenario is you've effectively halved the cache size, and that can cause major performance loss.
- The biggest benefit of x64 (for the masses) is the removal of the 4GB RAM barrier. Since most systems use extra RAM as a disk cache, this can bring substantial performance gains for disk-constrained applications like huge databases. In this sense, 64-bit does improve performance, but not necessarily because the application is using 64-bit code. Although a 32-bit program would be constrained to using 4GB or less, the OS could have far more at its disposal, improving overall system performance.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Bea is doing some interesting things with their LiquidVM, which lets you run Weblogic as the "Guest OS" on top of your hypervisor. I can see this letting shared hosting companies offer J2EE to their clients.
http://www.mhall119.com
However, Sun's JVM is dual-licensed, and as such they can't just include the Classpath code like IcedTea did, as that would violate Classpath's GPL license. Instead Sun is re-implementing the remaining code so that it can be dual-licensed as well.
http://www.mhall119.com
Inside of an applet? Java has 64 bit distributions. Just go to java.sun.com and download them. The GP was merely claiming that there may not be a 64 bit applet plugin for browsers.
Cow Cube
Are you sure it's an applet and not javascript? The onyl reason you'd have "cross browser incompatibilities" is if you were doing something that depended on the browser. Java doesn't; the other possibility is that you're somehow running Microsoft's old bug-ridden JRE.
As long as there are no people involved that have seen sample A, sample B is clean.
If I remember correctly, this is similar to how Compaq did it when reverse engineering IBM's BIOS. They had to get folks that didn't have ANY internal knowledge of the code. So the code is clean, but the functionality is the same.
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
There's more kinda of RAID than RAID-5. But thanks for playing anyway.
ZFS can do stuff that's pretty much like 0,1,5,6, and the 10,50,60 variants of that. It can also do multiple copies on a single disk, and does round-trip checksumming.
What other sorts of RAID do you find useful?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)