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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.
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.
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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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 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++.