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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.
64bit Support? Well I guess that will be trivial when we can at least build from source. Then into packages and Repo's :D
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
I think I'm with everyone here if I give Sun a big "Thank you!" for all their trouble and effort. Java would probably one of the biggest wins for the community and its release when it comes will be worth a celebration.
According to http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/sound/soundbanks.html that looks like Thomas "Dolby" Robertson's Beatnik, Inc. -- or who "isn't going to play ball"?
Does anybody know who they are?
I think we should get the rumor mill started with things like "actively discouraged open-source" and so on, after all Sun are doing a good thing yet it seems this one company have been holding it up with an over-zealous attitude to I.P.
... people recognize the scale and generosity of what Sun have done in GPL'ing their crown jewel.
Is it still their crown jewel, more than ZFS, DTrace, and other Solaris 10 features?I doubt Sun did this out of altruism. They didn't start being more open with Java until they had competition in the form of .Net
However, props to Sun for doing the sensible thing.
WTF !?!?!?
What kind of crack made a mod rate me INTERESTING there ? Was the satire/joke not obvious enough ?!
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The kind of free that doesn't turn intelligent computer scientists and engineers into retarded politicians whinging about intellectual property and patents rather than just getting the fuck on with it.
That's the rumor goin' round, since the pictures of Jeff Bonwick (Guy in charge of ZFS) and Linus Torvalds havin' some beers together surfaced: relevent article
I can only hope that Sun's going to move all development to the GPL branch in future.
To take Digium Asterisk as an example of a disastrous dual licensing scheme, they release a GPL version of their code and keep their proprietary version closed source (which means they can use no GPL code in it). All contributions made are given to Digium or put in the public domain - stripping the original author of his or her copyright.
So it's open source and you can take the code, branch it off and do whatever you want, but possible contributors are less willing to push upstream, and in a few instances Digium have refused to take really great innovative contributions because they use GPL code from other projects which cant be re-licensed and given to the company.
Back to the topic... it's not such an extreme situation as people can still make contributions under a dual CDDL/GPL license, but it's harmful in the long run because it greatly restricts how you can mix code/projects into Java without forking the dev effort.
May I suggest Myths and facts about 64-bit Linux for your reading pleasure ?
Yes but they let people have some say. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Community_Process If there was something that you wanted in Java you could make a Java Specification Request or JSR for it and hope it gets moved in. But we all want avoid bloat so this is a very slow heavy process. Take a look at this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history and you can see that several JSRs have been moved in to Java it self. I could be wrong but it seems that for Java 6 the additions to Java have all been from JSRs so it looks like Sun intends to have all new improvements go though the JCP first.
Come to think of it this reminds me a lot of other open projects. The code is open and you can suggest something should be in it. However if they say no you are SOL. You will have to compile the project on your own and add in your changes. What would you want instead? Is the only problem you have that Sun has final say in the JCP?
I Have enjoyed writing software in Mono for the past year or so and developing .Net applications at work a little longer.
But one thing bothers me - you know what I going to say next.... ..Patents! or MS derived technology.
Now, to be fair it seems pretty much most software is 'perceived' to violate a patent of some description today.
As I understand it the mono vm apparently is o.k. but some of the libraries(e.g. ADO, Windows.Forms, ASP and even c#) are suppossed to violate patents and this is unfortunate.
Some of the software I have written will have commercial applications and the *uncertainty* of the status of mono in general is in question. Even the MS 'agreements' signed by Novell purposely *exclude* mono in any protection.
Personally I prefer Mono(and some great apps are available-e.g. Banshee, MonoDevelop) compared to Java but because of the huge amount of work by Sun and the community to fully open-source Java I will switch to it immediately.
My reasons to switch are: .Net's direction from v2.00 to v3.5 is becoming more tied in to Windows. From v3.0(or v3.5?) Microsoft included Vista libraries are part of the default installation. It's the old MS Treadmill(tm) all over again.
1) Java is open-sourced and the actual company(Sun) that created it are fully involved and are a positive influence in the community.
2) Java is present in almost all modern mobile phones. There is great potential to leverage this and I'm sure there are many ways this can be used with the Desktop.
3) The development tools are free, full versions and are very powerful. Visual Studio Express is free but it has reduced functionality compared to the full version.
4) 'Peace of Mind'. I can develop my software without looking over my shoulder wondering 'will I get sued'!
5)
As far as I know both Java and Mono are very capable technologies. It is difficult to choose one on technical merit alone, it comes down to the licensing - Sun has fully committed to the community and Microsoft has been fairly under-handed.
If Mono is to survive and be taken seriously within the community it must take a completely different direction. Start developing open-source equivalents of the libraries (e.g. gtk# for gui controls).
Like I said before I prefer Mono to Java (concerning the gui Mono just 'feels' more responsive than Java).
What we should do as a community is to fully get behind Java and push its development and start using it on the desktop. We can create some great applications for it and keep open-source software 'untainted'.
Sun have made a great long-term decision by opening-up Java - it will be seen as a safe option and is available for many platforms. .Net's long-term future is in doubt because Microsoft will not open-source or allow competing versions to exist. Many forms of computers now exist today in mobile phones, pdas, laptops and many different types of CPUs. Java(in various forms) runs everywhere. By using Java as a common standard all these devices can communicate together and develop interesting uses.
Just the insane ramblings of a elderly programmer (I'm 38 you know!).
P.S. 'Get off my lawn!'
On the other hand, the GPL has some very specific restrictions on how code may be modified or re-licensed. It's also got that fantastic clause that RMS may retroactively change the terms of your license at any time (Linus ignores that one).
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I've downloaded Java from Sun a couple of years ago and didn't have to pay a dime!
(ducks for cover)
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I know, I know, free beer vs free speech, RMS etc.
Seriously, though, does anybody know of significant Java apps that use that javax.sound API which is the problem in OpenJDK?
Seems like this is the least frequently used (and least important) part of the J2SE API.
Obviously you don't understand teh slashdot. When someone mods you funny the comment gets scored up but you don't. So if you get modded funny and then overrated over and over all day, you will lose karma without the negative moderations ever going to metamoderation. Modding a joke with insightful is a means of combating this shortcoming of slashdot; insight is the key component of successful humor, so it is the most rational moderation to apply to a funny comment if you want to prevent this potential karma attack.
Obviously, karma is just a number, and you don't even get to see it; any poster who is right more than wrong tends to hit the karma kap (last I heard, it was 50) pretty quickly and stay within ten points of it, thus having no problem maintaining their comment score bonus. On the other hand, this is a real problem (funny is a positive moderation option because humor is a positive force - why should people be penalized for being funny?) so deliberately working against it is entirely valid.
I set myself unwilling to moderate because of the serious flaws in the moderation system; besides the above there is the very real problem that you are not allowed to comment and vote in the same story. The people most likely to post a comment actually worth reading and the only people actually qualified to moderate comments in a story are the same people! It's just like jury selection - to (poorly?) paraphrase Dennis Miller, the only way you can even get on a Jury is to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that you don't know shit about the case in question. Guess what? Moderation works precisely the same way. You can vote, or you can contribute actual information, but you can't do both.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Uh... Sun did that last summer, and the IcedTea provided the implementation.
What Sun is doing is to re-implement the audio code themselves so that they can dual-license Java.
I am primarily interested in whether JDK 7 is going to make it out this year or not. For the longest time it's been forecast to arrive in 2008, and yet, the existing binary snapshots seem very immature (ie. completely missing major features supposedly in Java7).
The silence is starting to concern me, I think Java desperately needs the updates in 1.7 to keep it alive in the face of competition from more dynamic languages.