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Java's Open Sourcing Still Controversial Ten Years Later (infoworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:
Sun Microsystems officially open-sourced Java on November 13, 2006... "The source code for Java was available to all from the first day it was released in 1995," says [Java creator James] Gosling, who is now chief architect at Liquid Robotics. "What we wanted out of that was for the community to help with security analysis, bug reporting, performance enhancement, understanding corner cases, and a whole lot more. It was very successful." Java's original license, Gosling says, allowed people to use the source code internally but not redistribute. "It wasn't 'open' enough for the 'open source' crowd," he says... While Gosling has taken Oracle to task for its handling of Java at times, he sees the [2006] open-sourcing as beneficial. "It's one of the most heavily scrutinized and solid bodies of software you'll find. Community participation was vitally important..."
A former Oracle Java evangelist, however, sees the open source move as watered down. "Sun didn't open-source Java per se," says Reza Rahman, who has led a recent protest against Oracle's handling of enterprise Java. "What they did was to open-source the JDK under a modified GPL license. In particular, the Java SE and Java EE TCKs [Technology Compatibility Kits] remain closed source."
Rahman adds that "Without open-sourcing the JDK, I don't think Java would be where it is today."
A former Oracle Java evangelist, however, sees the open source move as watered down. "Sun didn't open-source Java per se," says Reza Rahman, who has led a recent protest against Oracle's handling of enterprise Java. "What they did was to open-source the JDK under a modified GPL license. In particular, the Java SE and Java EE TCKs [Technology Compatibility Kits] remain closed source."
Rahman adds that "Without open-sourcing the JDK, I don't think Java would be where it is today."
Is Java still relevant? Sure a lot of people use it, but they've already made their decision 10-20 years ago. It's not an industry that is growing.
Yes there is more Java source every day, but that may mean the same people who have been coding for the last 10 years haven't retired yet.
As far as I can tell, it's used in a lot of backend stuff, where the hardware is well known and rarely changes.
As far as I can tell, it missed the mark on one of its major purposes: Write once, Run anywhere.
However, it did hit the mark on one thing: Attract corporations who want to employ cheap fools who, beyond copying "solutions" from blogs and pressing the "play" button, don't really know what they're doing.
the editors should be paid.
http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
Although Java was nominally made available under an open source license, Sun/Oracle retained intellectual property that allowed them to sue people for independent implementations. That's not truly open source. Java's so-called "open sourcing" was an intellectual property trap. Sun's proprietary control over Java and their hostility to third-party implementations also hurt the platform technically.
Yes, what Sun wanted was for thousands of Java contributors to work for free for Sun, and then monetize the value of those contributions. That was certainly "beneficial" to Sun and to Gosling's personal fortune.
Everybody else would have been better off, however, if people had realized from day one that Java was going to remain a proprietary platform and had contributed their efforts to actually free and open platforms instead of advancing Sun's corporate agenda.
Tim O'Reilly was heavily influential in switching momentum from what was known as "free software" to "open source" (see The Meme Hustler.)
The "community" aspect of the first was centered around empowering users, making sure that the four freedoms described by the FSF were defended to the end. The shift to "open source" meant that project efficiency was valued over user freedom.
This brought us to the current status, where young developers share their code on github without ever worrying to stamp a license on it, and permissive licenses are preferred to protective ones. We'll never know whether free software would have become the default, or dissappeared almost entirely, had this shift never occurred.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Sun meant one thing by 'open source'. Oracle has a different interpretation. And I can never tell with them if they plan on allowing an acquisition to flourish independently, die from inattention, take it out behind the barn and shoot it in the head, or morph it into something unrecognizable to suit hidden agendas.
One would think that a company finding that one of their products' market has grown immensely would be happy. And they would research the reasons why it grew into that market and work to protect and promote those attributes. But no. Not Oracle. They seem to be intent on making Android/Google regret the day they went with Java. "This will teach those stinking customers never to choose our products again!"
Oracle got its start building systems for the government. Specifically, the NSA and other similar TLAs. So it should be no surprise that they are always up to something devious and underhanded. Old habits die hard. Openness is anathema to these kinds of outfits. And I'd be very careful about building a product or system on top of something owned by Oracle where I didn't have a clear exit strategy or plan B.
Have gnu, will travel.
"It's one of the most heavily scrutinized and solid bodies of software you'll find." Then how come it still has over a thousand known security holes? Why is it still so incredibly slow and buggy?
Is Java still relevant? Sure a lot of people use it, but they've already made their decision 10-20 years ago.
You should talk to some COBOL and FORTRAN programmers.
As far as I can tell, it's used in a lot of backend stuff, where the hardware is well known and rarely changes.
As far as I can tell, it missed the mark on one of its major purposes: Write once, Run anywhere.
First of all, did you even read the first sentence that you wrote? While back-end systems that use Java do have pretty stable hardware, it's not like companies don't shift to different platforms all the time. Companies I worked for shifted backend hardware all the time (like Solaris to Linux). For enterprise work, in fact Java really is mostly write once run anywhere (modulo VM tuning).
But secondly, ever hear of a little thing called Android? Java is the primary language on that platform and as such is running LITERALLY everywhere as in billions of devices.
I personally always kind of liked Java even though these days I am working in other languages, and Java has done a decent job of keeping up with modern trends... Java is truly everywhere now, and is going to be with us for a very long time indeed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah; as I already said:
In addition to Android, a technology called 'Gluon' allows JavaFX to be run on the desktop, iOS and Android. It's pretty neat.
http://gluonhq.com/
Reza Rahman is just right on this one. Oracle doesn't get to flail around and change what open source is just because they want to.
Comes as a very weird statement to talk about Java being open source when Oracle keeps insisting on the lawsuit against Google/Android for copyright violations of the Java API. If Java really is open source, a lawsuit based on copyright violations of it's API doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Even more when the original owners were and still are ok with it, the whole thing becoming an issue only after Oracle purchased it.
If this:
"It's one of the most heavily scrutinized and solid bodies of software you'll find.",
why is it that I was updating Java for because of security exploits 2 and 3 times a week before I finally uninstalled it?
We have a client-server management application. The thing runs on windows and
linux desktops just fine. The backend will run on linux-x86, linux-arm, and linux-ppc.