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."

Comments

Sorry but

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Where IS Java today?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:O'Reilly did it

[TuringTest]

There is no way that Free Software was going to become mainstream except by becoming just another flavor of Open Source.

See, people used to say the same thing about Wikipedia. Yet the Free Encyclopedia that Anyone can Edit is licensed under the GPL-like GDDL and the share-alike version of Creative Commons.

And I can write software under the Apache license and everybody can use it, Free Software and Open Source alike! Yay!

...provided you don't step on any patent landmine, and that a big player doesn't try to shut down your competing start-up. What good is free software if you can only make small projects with it, and can't use it to compete with the entrenched industry?

Have you heard of the UNIX wars? People using UNIX systems in the 70's felt the same way, and then large companies started to try closing free reuse of the platform and collecting royalties, as well as closing the source of essential drivers and modules, so the "free system" with "source available to all" became a clusterfuck of competing systems with unclear legal status.

Given the current state of things, the same is bound to happen sooner than later; in fact, it already happened in the case of Java. The Oracle/Google case is a recent example of how you can't really use open source software if there aren't strong guarantees, and Google had to pay for it.

In the old days before the OSI, a project like Android would have been shunned by the FLOSS community; Google would have been forced to open-source the full stack, or build their own proprietary from scratch.

As Google needed at the time to come up with a mobile operative system, the second option would have been too slow. If the community have made a strong stance, they would have had a chance to make it happen, and all our cells could have been running a nearly-open stack, instead of a nearly-closed one; and projects like Meego and LiMo might have had a chance (there were very BIG players behind them). Don't subestimate the power of politics.

Unfortunately, as the above linked article explains, the focus shifted from guaranteeing strong freedom to all industrial parties (which is what FLOSS was about, not merely allowing users to get the software for free), to guaranteeing fluidity of development for small teams; the possibility to grow big without interference from the main players was lost in the process.