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Sun opens up Java 2 platform source
Manuka writes "An Inforworld article tells us that Sun, in an effort to make Java more accessible, has made the Java 2 source available under a new license. " The new license makes it possible for "developers to use and modify the source code for commercial products free of charge; allows them to
change the code without having to return their changes to Sun; and lets developers modify and share source code without involving Sun." A step in the right direction.
How much further could they possibly go?
Didn't they take MS to court for doing that with the first version?
http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,10 14005,00.html
According to PC Week, Sun's going to do the same to Solaris.
Personally, I think that this is the route Sun should've taken from the beginning, but that's just me. This is good news.
Oh, yeah: Hey, with pervasive multithreading, and maybe some nifty RMI package calls, just think of the 'l33t Beo cluster apps you could... enh. Whatever.
Maybe they'll get Java to the point where it's actually GOOD on the web.
Right now, Java is nothing but an annoyance on websites, as it grinds the hard drive, instantly sucks up 10-20 MB of memory, and slows down my Pentium system.
Before getting too excited about "free of charge," read the part about where they get royalties (when you sell anything). I am surprised that Sun is getting so much support from the open source community, when their agreement is not that open.
Sun has to control the feature set and API, at least until there is no OS monopoly like Microsoft who can pollute it and turn it into a de-facto proprietary standard.
NO, the source is not open! Sun still wants you
to sign a long a complicated license, and they
want you to pay them money to use your changes
to the source. True they do give you the source
code, but they also force you to pay to use
it. That is not "Open Source" and it is nowhere
near "Free Software"! If you want to see Java
free of Sun control help out with the Kaffe or
Japhar projects. These JVMs are really free.
Sorry folks but this is old news. Sun did make
/ lw-02-letters.html
the Java source code "less restricted" but it
is not "more free". The license does not meet
the Open Source definition and RMS himself
has commented on how this license is just
a sham to try to get free work out of developers.
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-02
They were planning to release Java Workshop for free in January.
I heard a rumor it was pushed back to late February. Does anyone
know the details on this?
BTW, they were planning to release Java Workshop as open source later in the year.
Anyone feel like grabbing the Mozilla source and adding an interpreter for scheme or perl (Or both?)
Well, not quite a lie, but misleading.
Read the license.
If you deploy your modifications internally - Sun considers it to be commercial use, and you have to pay up.
If you can't hack the code, and then USE the hacked code, what the hell is the point?
damn it.
So, is there any java runner for Linux that supports java 2 yet?
I know the blackdown one isn't done, but there are a bunch of jdk1.1 ports, so I thought there might be at least one
Are there any others being attempted even?
Dude, you do know that you can run the JMF
code in JDK 1.1.7 right? The only big reason
the use the 1.2 is the thread local temp
object allocation and the faster synchronization.
Um, That problem you had was Netscape's buggy
VM implementation.
Have you tried the actual Java plug in?
No. Because you are a clueless idiot
You make some good points, but at some point it seems that we will need to accept the fact that there will be a subset of software that is "open source" but not necessarily free. There's no reason why developers who end up selling products based on Sun's code shouldn't have to pay royalties to sun if that's what Sun wants. It's not necessarily a sin to want to make money from your work. It's also not a sin not to - it's your choice. In addition to completely free software, there are inevitably going to be applications that probably won't get written unless there is profit for the developers. Even this kind of software could benefit from open source development as long as all the developers can share the profits.
The Penguin Package provides sandbox capabilities for Perl.
You have no clue what you are talking about. Slashdot is full of poseurs.
That's why.
Actually, they took them to court for violating their contract, to create a version of java for the win32 platform.
It doesn't matter if the license here would allow things that microsoft did, they were already under a previous contract.
Interesting. There haven't been any pointers versus references or procedural versus OO flame wars.
/. .
This is seriously weird for
I like your attitude. This story is a bit old, and it was on the Java Lobby website some time ago. In the replies to that story there were a lot of things that sounded like "This isn't open or free. If it isn't I don't like it. Sun should give me all its technology for free, because I deserve it." A lot of people seem to have this attitude, but I personally don't see what is wrong with a company charging for what they invent. This is a capitalistic society after all. But I imagine I am rambling on and complaining for no reason at all. Just my oppinion. I don't mean to offend anyone or start any wars about OSS or anything. Sorry I am anonymous, but I don't feel like getting an account.
Sun doesn't want Java to split into 3000 different platforms, so it is trying to keep some control over what is done to the platform. With this system, from what I understand, you can modify VMs for use with whatever you need to do for free, but if you want to distribute your modification in some way, you need to pay for it. I would say that odds are if you are distributing your VM, you will likely be profiting from it, so giving some of this to Sun for letting you use their technology seems reasonable. If Sun made Java truly open source, maybe Microsoft could legally fragment it, which it obviously wants to do. Regular VMs are free to download from Sun, but if you want to change it and re-distribute it, you have to pay. I personally see nothing wrong with this. Sun owns the technology you are modifying, so giving them something for it isn't too bad. At least you don't have to pay to get it in the first place.
There were no extra java.* classes. There were extra keywords and stuff though, weren' there? And they had some MS only native method interface, like JDirect or something instead of JNI and they left out RMI (I forget what they put in instead of RMI though).
re-understand (is that a word? :)
:)
yes, it is approved hacker-speak
True, but Sun invented Java, and they are trying to profit from it as well. If they give you code and you make a profit off of it, do they not have the right to gain some money? If you wrote some great piece of software, and someone else wanted to look at the code and use a lot of it in his application, and he made millions of dollars, wouldn't you like some money for what you gave him? I am not saying you will make millions from modifying Java code, but still. If I had bought stock in Microsoft when it was a little company and now it is a multi-billion dollar corporation, I would want some return for what I gave to them. This is very similar to this situation.
So there. :p
No, the problem here is not that the new Sun license is not "open" or "free," but rather that it is being advertised as "open." It's not open, but if everybody screams that it is open, then true OS JVM's will languish in the face of this new competition for OS-developer mindshare. Why slave over your own OS JVM when you could be improving a more mature "OS" JVM from Sun?
Perhaps I'm overreacting here, but this new license seems like a form of dumping -- release a mostly-kinda-sorta-libre product, demand royalties from the very programmers that improved your product, and at the same time watch the wholly libre projects languish from inattention...
On the other hand, this may be a good-faith effort to convert from their as-proprietary-as-Microsoft shop to a more open one, and the details of the license had to include compromises with the Sun suits. Netscape recently liberalized their licensing schemes for some of their software; perhaps in time Sun will go all the way and drop the modification tax in their license.
I am using Java2 on an off and on project
( and I have to keep booting into NT JUST for that ). The reason I am using Java2 mostly because of Graphics2D classes. My application has to do wierd text rendering ( rotated fonts etc) with i18n and animations too... And its a pleasure to use Java2 for that sort of stuff... I haven't come across any Windows SDK in C++ or whatever that even comes close to that sort of capability. Admittedly my Windows development experience is limited but I HAVE used C++ Builder from broland and its supposed to be way... ahead of other avaialble environments for class lib. sophistication. But java in general is such a pleasant language to use compared to C++ ( try doing threading with C++ and MFC or VCL)
Just my 2 bits.
Python, baby.
.. there is an accompanying rise in commercially funded OSS development, for example, Corel's involvement in Wine development. Sun would continue on Solaris. Netscape continues on Mozilla. Sun continues on Java. Etc etc.
Yes, it is. If I use this native interface, then my programs will only work on windows, I believe. Microsoft added those keywords to the language and didn't tell people that it wasn't really Java. It only works with their VM, so it is limiting the portability of Java.
Does this mean that the Blackdown developers can
pre-release their almost working source? or
the diffs to them?
Posted by DarkYoda:
It better be alot faster
or someone might get hurt!
~SbD~
Posted by Mr. Assembly:
I got to be honest, who is gong to want to look at NT source 18 months from now. As corporations 'get it' there's not going to be a market for code
that's going to need massive hours to debug. It will be easier to be a rat, leave the ship, and do a linux port.
According to the rules, every class that is part of the official portable cross-platform Java spec goes into the java.* heirarchy (java.lang, java.util, java.awt, etc...). Anything that is not portable goes outside the java.* heirarchy, for example, "mystuff.whatever.classA", or perhaps something like "win32.some.proprietary.exra".
The idea is that then, unlike in most other languages, the programmer doesn't need to rely on some big manual to figure out what is and isn't portable - the programmer just knows from the name of the class in the hierarchy if it is proprietary or not.
That's what MS ruined, by adding Win32-specific extras to the java.* hierarchy instead of as separate classes. And that's what Sun's complaint is about.
Under the new license, people could grab sun's source and make their own versions of the classes, but they'd better not install them into java.* like MS tried to do - put them somewhere else.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
This makes the, unfounded, assumption that there is only a single pool of developers and that all
applications overlap...this is probably not true.
The only way you will get a kernel hacker writing java is at gunpoint, it just has no relevance for
what they want to do. One would imagine that this is the same in reverse for many groups.
Of course there will be projects that don't get sufficient interest to build a development team.
That is expected, evolution in action. It also means that there is an opening for a commercial
product here.
I guess any evolutionary system requires some products to fail the fitness test, but given the
permanence of computer storage they live on as open source fossils (which can be revived should
it be neccessary).
is the One True Way. Client side java is bullshit.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
That's a good question, and my response is that ports to linux & freebsd could be made to pass the compliance tests much sooner if we could debug in parallel, which means letting people like you and me find bugs in the betas. Make sense?
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
And don't forget to check out the classpath project, which stands a better chance of getting Java2 features to linux in a reasonable timeframe.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
And, as someone else pointed out, one could always just run swing on 1.1.7.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
So, while it may seem like open-source on the surface, it seems like they've managed to make an almost-open-source license that has all of the hype and none of the benefit, at least for the freenix community, anyway.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Damn, you GO Sun! :)
Hey, compliance testing may be a pain in the ass, but I for one wouldn't mind knowing that what I write will work flawlessly elsewhere because of it. That is, if I even used Java... ;>
Amen brother.
Not only is Perl code difficult to maintain, making it lousy for enterprise applications, but it has no security model! What could be a better for an applet language except, possibly scheme?
Personally I like Java quite a lot. But once in a while I get the feeling that Tcl is still a better-developed system for writing secure, windowed, cross-platform code. And I sure wish I knew why people were so scathing of it.
There is absolutely NOTHING in the GPL that precludes the software from being provided by its owner under a different license. Many people have already done this. Examples include Ghostscript and Kaffe. In fact, paragraph 12 of the GPL actually explicitly states this. Of course, the owner is not required to do so.
What the GPL prohibits is someone other than the owner from taking the GPL'd code and releasing it under a different license.
Presumably, as the author of code that you want to offer under multiple licenses, you must surely want this protection?
Richness my ****. They added methods to the java.* classes. I have Visual J++ on my machine here in front of me and I am looking at it right now ... There are extra methods in the java.* hierarchy. Thats the problem, and it is *one* of the breaches of their license agreement with Sun (the others being not implementing the entire platform spec and modifying the core language).
Yeah, Mozilla could stand be another 5 or 10 megabytes bigger...
Yes, of course, compliance is good for Java. The problem is that the people working at Blackdawn (is that it?) can't release their source until it's finished. This is a problem, as open source things tend to get finished much quicker when they're actually open.
Steps like this make me think that the flood-gates are going to open over the next 18 months. The source to NT will probably be open by then. However there are only so many cumulative OSS geek hours in a day. What then? As much of this newly liberated code languors on the net unimproved will the mystique of OSS crumble?
Nope. They took MS to court for messing with the definition of Java. This new licensing affects the implementation of Java, which is a rather different thing.
--
"If you can read this you are too close."