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Sun's Java Will Be Free This Year

Posted by kdawson on Mon Jun 23, 2008 04:12 AM
from the long-strange-trip dept.
Java Programming
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.
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[+] IcedTea's OpenJDK Passes Java Test Compatibility Kit 271 comments
emyar writes "At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology. [...] This week the IcedTea Project reached an important milestone — The latest OpenJDK binary included in Fedora 9 (x86 and x86_64) passes the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). This means that it provides all the required Java APIs and behaves like any other Java SE 6 implementation — in keeping with the portability goal of the Java platform."
Submission: Sun: Java will be free this year by Anonymous Coward
[+] Sun Spokesman Says "We Screwed Up On Open Source" 248 comments
An anonymous reader sends along a video from Builder AU, in which Sun's chief open source officer Simon Phipps describes 2001-2002 as 'a period where Sun 'screwed up' in their dealings with the open source community. Phipps says that Sun is trying to remedy the situation with the open sourcing of Java, Solaris, and the rest of Sun's software."
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Sun's Java Will Be Free This Year 50 Comments More /

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  • Next Question... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Techman83 (949264) on Monday June 23 2008, @04:15AM (#23901057)
    64bit Support? Well I guess that will be trivial when we can at least build from source. Then into packages and Repo's :D

    • Re:Next Question... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2008, @04:18AM (#23901071)

      And then we can fork it and wreak havoc on MicroSoft's plans by calling it .Nut!
      Oh yey.

    • Re:Next Question... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Octorian (14086) on Monday June 23 2008, @06:50AM (#23901695) Homepage

      Java has had 64-bit support for a very long time.

      The only thing they haven't provided is a 64-bit web browser plugin. (And believe it or not, these days applets are probably the vast minority of where Java is actually used.)

      • Re:Next Question... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Techman83 (949264) on Monday June 23 2008, @04:30AM (#23901119)
        Tried both 64bit Java plugins for firefox in Ubuntu 8.04 and have had limited success in a couple of things (mainly our secure access portal), but I can't say I've tested thoroughly a range of different things, nor had time to try and resolve the issue. Everything works great on my 32 bit install (but using the Proprietary plugin).

  • Adobe + Sun + Opensource = Heaven (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2008, @04:19AM (#23901073)

    Am I the only one who loves Coldfusion?

    -Jim Bastard

  • two months for rewriting code? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by crazybit (918023) on Monday June 23 2008, @04:27AM (#23901105)

    Why don't they just optimize the needed lines from IcedTea and glue them to their licensed code?

    isn't that supposed to be the way OSS benefits the community?

    • Re:two months for rewriting code? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2008, @04:33AM (#23901135)

      Sun wants to retain the dual licensing model for now (see above) and thus they cannot just use GPL'd code just yet. On the bright side they can change the license now at wish and can make Java GPLv3 or BSD any time they want.

  • Major thanks + minor celebration (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2008, @04:43AM (#23901175)

    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.

  • On other news (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2008, @04:47AM (#23901197)

    This is also the year of Linux on desktop.

  • Don't rewrite, just remove it! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Daniel Phillips (238627) on Monday June 23 2008, @04:51AM (#23901223)

    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.
    One of the major benefits of releasing something into open source is the volunteer help. Don't hold it back just because a relatively small component needs to be rewritten. Remove the component again, leaving stubs, and just explain what it's supposed to do. For something as major as a GPL Java, the component will be rewritten by volunteers in no time at all, plus a small well defined project like that is a great way to get up to speed on a new code base.

    • Re:Don't rewrite, just remove it! (Score:5, Informative)

      by HJED (1304957) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:33AM (#23901377) Homepage
      there are volunteers who have been working on this for some time here [java.net]
      which is what JDK 7 .0 [java.net] is based on!

    • Re:Don't rewrite, just remove it! (Score:4, Informative)

      by mhall119 (1035984) on Monday June 23 2008, @11:43AM (#23905167) Homepage Journal

      One of the major benefits of releasing something into open source is the volunteer help. Don't hold it back just because a relatively small component needs to be rewritten. Remove the component again, leaving stubs, and just explain what it's supposed to do. For something as major as a GPL Java, the component will be rewritten by volunteers in no time at all, plus a small well defined project like that is a great way to get up to speed on a new code base.
      That is exactly what Sun did, the released all of the code they owned as GPL (last year), and provided binary "plugs" for the rest so that you could still modify and compile a working JVM. Redhat's IcedTea project took the available code, replaced the "plugs" with code from the Classpath project, and produced a fully GPL'd JVM.

      However, Sun's JVM is dual-licensed, and as such they can't just include the Classpath code like IcedTea did, as that would violate Classpath's GPL license. Instead Sun is re-implementing the remaining code so that it can be dual-licensed as well.

  • I hope (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dwalsh (87765) on Monday June 23 2008, @04:54AM (#23901233)

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

    • Re:I hope (Score:5, Funny)

      by kaffiene (38781) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:15AM (#23901307)

      You're new to slashdot, then?

    • Re:I hope (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2008, @05:18AM (#23901319)

      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.

      • Re:I hope (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dwarfking (95773) on Monday June 23 2008, @07:34AM (#23901929) Homepage

        Which is exactly why they should do it, considering that Sun is a for-profit publicly traded company. Commercial gain is what they are supposed to do.

        It will be interesting to see where this all leads.

    • Re:I hope (Score:5, Funny)

      by nonewmsgs (1249950) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:30AM (#23901357)

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

      you mean zfs is going to be gpl'ed?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by isorox (205688)

      ... 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?

  • In other news (Score:4, Funny)

    by silentcoder (1241496) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:29AM (#23901355) Homepage

    RMS has decried the GPL'ing of Java as being a major assault on free software advocacy.
    "For years we have warned people to steer clear of writing free software in languages that require non-free VM's or other components to work by calling this the 'Java trap'. Using this well known example with a VM that is slow and bloated and used for software that doesn't fit into any OS anywhere and which nobody actually liked, quickly got the point made and we could then more easily make the point about things that some people actually enjoyed like educational games written in flash... now SUN has GPL'd Java they have made removed our greatest example of the evils of the erm flash trap ! This may still have been a win for free software if only anything usable had ever been written in Java - but seeing as nothing has, it was only ever good as an example. Universities used the language as an example of good object orientation, we used the license as an example of the s/java/flash/g trap" the FSF founder said in a press release.

    Despite his hardcore geek nature the release will more likely be remembered for his attempts at a verbal sed script than for it's actual point.

    • Re:In other news (Score:5, Interesting)

      by silentcoder (1241496) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:38AM (#23901389) Homepage

      WTF !?!?!?
      What kind of crack made a mod rate me INTERESTING there ? Was the satire/joke not obvious enough ?!

      • Re:In other news (Score:5, Funny)

        by Mortice (467747) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:42AM (#23901411)

        s/obvious/funny/g

      • Re:In other news (Score:5, Interesting)

        by drinkypoo (153816) <martin.espinoza@gmail.com> on Monday June 23 2008, @09:57AM (#23903555) Homepage Journal

        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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Marcus Green (34723)

      "RMS has decried the GPL'ing of Java as being a major assault on free software advocacy."

      Strange, according to multiple easily locatable sources Mr Stallman was very pleased with the idea and execution of the release of Java under the GPL and when the GPL announcement was made a video was available of him endorsing the move. Could you give a source for your apparent quote from RMS?

  • It's good news (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bogaboga (793279) on Monday June 23 2008, @06:11AM (#23901541)
    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.

  • This is Great News (I'm a .Net/Mono Developer!!) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mrpacmanjel (38218) on Monday June 23 2008, @07:46AM (#23901999)

    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:
    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) .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.

    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!'

  • Richard was right (Score:5, Informative)

    by iwbcman (603788) on Monday June 23 2008, @07:51AM (#23902031) Homepage
    Richard was right.

    Do you guys and gals remember when Richard did a short stint in a video for Sun following the announcement that Sun had decided to GPL Java ?

    I can only imagine how happy Richard was on that day. He had every reason to be so. Not simply because Sun had chosen to use his license for Java-but rather because of a little bit of historical trivia that most Free Software users are too young to remember.

    Now surely you know the name James Gosling. He was the one who created Java. But did you know that there is a rather interesting relationship between him and Richard ?

    One of the single biggest reasons that Richard wrote the GPL and created what we now know as Free Software has everything to do with James Gosling.

    "In the early years (1984 to 1988), the GNU Project did not have a single license to cover all its software. What led Stallman to the creation of this copyleft license was his experience with James Gosling, creator of NeWs and the Java programming language, and UniPress, over Emacs. While Stallman created the first Emacs in 1975, Gosling wrote the first C-based Emacs (Gosling Emacs) running on Unix in 1982. Gosling initally allowed free distribution of the Gosling Emacs source code, which Stallman used in early 1985 in the first version (15.34) of GNU Emacs. Gosling later sold rights to Gosling Emacs to UniPress, and Gosling Emacs became UniPress Emacs. UniPress threatened Stallman to stop distributing the Gosling source code, and Stallman was forced to comply. He later replace these parts with his own code. (Emacs version 16.56). (See the Emacs Timeline) To prevent free code from being proprietarized in this manner in the future, Stallman invented the GPL."

    http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/ [free-soft.org]

    Many people who are ignorant of this history have always been affronted by Stallman's use of the phrase "Java Trap". But is it really any wonder that Richard chose to use that expression-given what personally had transpired between him and James Gosling.

    Bill Joy was the cofounder of Sun Microsystems. He is also the guy who originally wrote Vi. Bill Joy was also friends with James Gosling- and made Gosling's baby practically synonymous with the name Sun.

    This little bit of trivia adds a whole lot to all of the flamefests over the years about Emacs vs. Vi. SunOS, which we now know as OpenSolaris, was the first heavily commercialized version of what we now know as BSD. Bill Joy used the code written at Berkley to create the original SunOS.

    That Java is now GPL is nothing less than Sun saying to Richard-"Richard, you were right". And if one day OpenSolaris embraces the GPL Richard's victory will be complete.

    You may think this is nothing but propaganda-but I encourage you to actually *learn* about the history of these giants of the computer world.

    Now that the OpenJDK is %100 Free, %100 GPL, Richard has received the kind of vindication that hardly *anyone* in life ever gets. Cheers to you Richard and Cheers to Sun for seeing the light.

    • Re:not quite (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ice Tiger (10883) on Monday June 23 2008, @04:31AM (#23901121) Homepage

      Once the GPL version is out there it's out there, having a closed source licence version won't stop that.

    • Re:not quite (Score:5, Informative)

      by Whiney Mac Fanboy (963289) * <whineymacfanboy@gmail.com> on Monday June 23 2008, @04:46AM (#23901191) Homepage Journal

      Dual licensing means that Sun still has special rights

      If Sun has copyright, they have special rights regardless of how many licenses they release Java under.

      Frankly, if Java's released under a free license, its irrelevant what other licenses you use with it.

      (is perl less free because of dual licensing? KDE?)

      • Re:not quite (Score:4, Interesting)

        by moosesocks (264553) on Monday June 23 2008, @08:38AM (#23902577) Homepage

        Frankly, if Java's released under a free license, its irrelevant what other licenses you use with it.
        That depends on what you consider a "free" license. If we're talking about BSD, then your statement is indeed true. You can do anything with BSD code, as long as you credit the original authors and bundle a copy of the license.

        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).

    • Re:not quite (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmaDaden (794446) on Monday June 23 2008, @07:23AM (#23901855)
      Yes but they let people have some say. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Community_Process [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] 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?

      • Re:not quite (Score:5, Informative)

        by IBBoard (1128019) on Monday June 23 2008, @04:38AM (#23901159) Homepage

        Sun would still have special rights whether it was dual licensed or not.

        Exactly - as soon as Sun put code in to it (i.e. the start) they had rights on it in terms of having control over people re-licensing it. Now that it's GPLed then Sun can do whatever they want, but the GPL version is still out there and free for people to take and modify.

    • Re:Why Sun's Java? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Antique Geekmeister (740220) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:31AM (#23901365)
      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.
    • 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.

      • When you know who the company is, you can then start asking the right questions like:


        •  
        • Why weren't they willing to allow Sun to open-source it?

        •  
        • Were they asking for more money? So much that Sun saw it as unreasonable?

        •  
        • Is it pure politics?

        iirc it might have been the midi component of the sound system, but any more information would be great.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by CastrTroy (595695)
        The fact that they can just rewrite it means that it isn't deeply woven into the language. What they are doing, is writing a new library against the same API, so that they can open source it. They could probably release a version of the JDK without those parts of the API, and a lot of would not notice, because very few apps make use of those APIs. Especially in the server realm, where Java is most popular. Methinks you don't know what you're talking about, because this isn't a major problem. They are eas

    • Re:Obsolete (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Marcus Green (34723) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:32AM (#23901369) Homepage

      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)

        • Re:Please excuse my ignorance... (Score:5, Informative)

          by rapiddescent (572442) on Monday June 23 2008, @08:27AM (#23902449) Homepage

          The vast majority of Java coding is in Enterprise Middleware - e.g. trading systems, payment engines, SOA, eCommerce middleware, messaging buses, ERP, etc. typically run on JBoss, BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere and Oracle OC4J. These are often part of larger SOA offerings such as: BEA Aqualogic, Oracle Fusion, JBoss/RedHat SOA platform - all are Java based.

          The large finance orgs where I work have 100's, perhaps 1000's of java people for every C++ person.

          You'd find that most designers/architects would not normally spec java as a front end technology and would *extremely rarely* spec C++ for middleware. For a time in the 90's, C++ middleware nearly took off using containers from folks like IONA - but I've not seen an enterprise middleware container for C++ for a while now thats anything like the spec of a J2EE container - with the exception of microsoft's .net framework that can use C# - which is probably more akin to java than C++.

      • Re:JAVA Stock will be free this year, too. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by williamhb (758070) on Monday June 23 2008, @09:04AM (#23902917) Homepage Journal

        It's amazing. Millions of people around the world, using their product, and they still can't make good money off it. Granted, they give it away for free, but there still should be a lot of money to make in support contracts.

        Well, there is ... but it's money that's being made by Accenture, Computer Science Corporation, and all the other technology consultancies. That's the snag with the "GPL'ed software plus consulting" business model: sure, there is money to be made in consulting, but 90% of it will be made by established consulting companies that don't have the expensive distraction of having to write the software in the first place and can focus exclusively on the profit-making side.

        Or, to put it really harshly, "There's loads of profit to be made in GPL'ed software, for everybody except the fool that's writing it." (Yes, yes, I know that's overstating it, but I thought I'd leave some mod points up for grab for the replies!)

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