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Sun's Java Will Be Free This Year

Posted by kdawson on from the long-strange-trip dept.

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.

7 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. I hope by dwalsh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... people recognize the scale and generosity of what Sun have done in GPL'ing their crown jewel.

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    ${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
    1. Re:I hope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't want to take away from the great collaberative thing they've done. They are definitely pulling their weight. However, you should realise they don't do this because they are a charity. They do this because they think it will give them commercial gain.

      It's main benefit is it becomes much safer to rely on Java than on DotNet. Once Sun has done this you can commit to their platform knowing that they cannot take the rug away from under your own software. That's a promise which makes Sun Java much more attractive.

  2. Re:Why Sun's Java? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Multiple, parallel versions splits development efforts. It also splits QA efforts, and makes support for both versions problematic. It's usually much safer to have a primary release and branches to test new features, rather than being forced to rewrite from scratch. I give good credit to Sun for doing this: it's one of the missing Java support components for the open source world, and should allow inclusion of actual Java in distributions such as Fedora and Mandriva, saving us serious pain maintaining multiple, slightly conflicting versions in different locations for different packages. And it should make OpenOffice installations much smaller and more efficient.

  3. Re:The company that owns the sound support stuff by frodo+from+middle+ea · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes , bad mouthing a company without knowing anything about it, that's the way we can get companies to be more OSS friendly. Way to go.

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    for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
  4. Re:Obsolete by Marcus+Green · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes of course Java will be declared obsolete this year. As one of the top most in demand tech skill on the planet all the usuers are furiously swapping to make sure they convert to product Y by the end of the year and abandon the last ten years of development. (try typing in the word Java to a job search engine, then type in your favorite skill de jour)

  5. It's good news by bogaboga · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Once again, I thank SUN for all efforts in this direction. My request to other OSS evangelists is to let existing Open source implementations of Java die so that efforts can be spent on this SUN implementation alone. The availability of multiple implementations of the same idea is not getting us very far so far. I hope we have learned from this.

  6. Re:No please! LET IT DIE!!! by c0p0n · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Applets? Do you think that's what Java is used for these days? Have you been in hibernation, or serving time?

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    Your head a splode