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Will Sun Open Source Java?
Posted by
samzenpus
on Mon May 01, 2006 11:10 PM
from the free-coffee dept.
from the free-coffee dept.
capt turnpike writes "According to eWEEK.com, there's an internal debate going on at Sun whether to open-source Java. (Insert typical response: "It's about time!") Company spokespersons have no official comment, as might be expected, but perhaps we could hear confirmation or denial as early as May 16, at the JavaOne conference. One commentator said, "Sun should endorse PHP and go one step forward and make sure the 'P' languages run great on the JVM [Java virtual machine] by open-sourcing Java." Would this move Java up the desirability scale in your eyes? Could this be a way to help improve what's lacking in Java?"
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If they do, it will all depend upon the license. (Score:5, Insightful)
What changes and how would depend upon which license was chosen.
Re:If they do, it will all depend upon the license (Score:5, Informative)
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Mustang changes this (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/
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No (Score:5, Insightful)
No, haven't they already said that? Like hundreds of times? And does it really matter?
"Sun should endorse PHP and go one step forward and make sure the 'P' languages run great on the JVM [Java virtual machine] by open-sourcing Java."
"No", who would run PHP on Java anyway? Why? Why would open-sourcing it help?
"Would this move Java up the desirability scale in your eyes?"
No, Java is already desirable in my eyes.
"Could this be a way to help improve what's lacking in Java?"
No, what is lacking?
People who complain that Java is slow, should be open-sourced, and so on have never seemed to had a clue.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Will people stop trying to move Java towards a culture that won't keep Java up to the same standards Sun has? There's a reason why the top two server side platform these days are
The only place I ever see Java going is perhaps to be bought by another bigger company who has a similar path. My only hope is that it's IBM because their Java apps are of a higher quality than Sun's, and they've done such good work with the Eclipse platform.
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Re:No (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, any equivalent app in Java would have more lines of opaque XML configuration than the "POS LAMP application" has code. It will also be slower, eat several times as much memory, and depend on specific versions of two dozen frameworks.
The Rails version, OTOH, would be about 4 lines long and deployed before the Java guys managed to fire up their Eclipse bloatware. It would, however, be about the same speed as the Java app.
The Lisp version would never fail, would have source code in the form of a haiku, could tell the future and control the weather. It will never be written because all those parentheses look funny.
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Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Irrespective of any ideological issues, there are a few reasons the current situation hurts Java a bit.
Foremost for quite a few readers of slashdot is that free Linux distributions can't include Java in their default install. That means Java-based apps are not going to be included either. And since users need to jump through quite a few hoops to get Java installed (don't say "it's easy" - for most people anything beyond using their package manager is too high a hurdle), you can't assume it will be available on desktops in general.
The second issue is that Java does not really play well with the desktop. I have set up my desktop to run fine using three languages - English, Swedish and Japanese - and made sure everything from localization to character input works smoothly. But Java does not cooperate; it has its own way of dealing with CJK characters and needs its own fonts and separate setup to work. I have fiddled a little with it, but have never gotten it to work properly (especially being able to run an app in Swedish while still being able to input Japanese). And since it uses its own input method, it does not share the local dictionary so typing becomes frustratingly different from any other application I use. And since the code is not open, distributions can't fix these interoperability issues.
Both of these issues serve as disincentives from using Java apps and from writing them in the first place.
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Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
No, haven't they already said that? Like hundreds of times? And does it really matter?
Sure it matters. A lot of people have issues with it because of the license. It would clearly expand the number of potential adopters to go open source. More adopters will mean better tools.
"Sun should endorse PHP and go one step forward and make sure the 'P' languages run great on the JVM [Java virtual machine] by open-sourcing Java."
"No", who would run PHP on Java anyway? Why? Why would open-sourcing it help?
Well, I agree with the first part. But presumably integration will get better/faster in open source.
"Would this move Java up the desirability scale in your eyes?"
No, Java is already desirable in my eyes.
But a lot of people would find it more desireable. You can trust that java won't go away in open source, whereas you can't really say the same as long as SUN is at the helm.
"Could this be a way to help improve what's lacking in Java?"
No, what is lacking?
Mostly modernizing. The pace of java development is glacial, compared to say what is going on in C# or Ruby. People with specific integration issues that can't get sun to address compatibility problems are stuck.
People who complain that Java is slow, should be open-sourced, and so on have never seemed to had a clue.
There's no doubt java is still slow in a number of contexts. There are also obvious opportunities for performance enhancement that could be addressed in an open source process. I recently benchmarked ten of my applications in c++ and java, java is about 2x slower for most of the cases I tried, and never faster. To me, that's perfectly acceptable, but java could make more inroads into other areas of computing if it was more competitive in performance. More inroads means more developers, and that means better tools, which is what I yearn for.
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Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, Sun's Java compiler has always had broken dependancy tracking (at least since I started using it heavily in 1999). (If a build has an error, the set of output class files may be such that the next run of the compiler skips a source file which needs to be compiled; this is mainly that it can generate the public class without generating other classes in the same file.) I think it's likely that, if Sun does open source the JDK, they'll get fixes for a number of annoying flaws of that sort pretty quickly, and things that are clearly wrong but aren't considered worth working on will be improved substantially.
Of course, there's essentially no chance that they'll relax their grip on the language standard, and they probably shouldn't, unless they turn it over to a standards body due to no longer being able to employ good language designers.
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Save Apache some time ... (Score:5, Insightful)
WINE did it for Win32 and Mono did it for
Now that Sharp's Zaurus has dropped Java,
SLM
Re:Open Java (Score:5, Informative)
Kaffe and GNU/Classpath are excellent, active projects with dedicated developers. Notably, GNU/Classpath has recently passed the 99% code coverage mark measured against the Java SE specification. Apache Harmony was started because Apache won't use code licensed under the GPL, not because of any technical defect in the work of the Kaffe and GNU/Classpath developers. Harmony is also making excellent progress and has a skilled and active community. Both are committed to making compatible implementations of Java, but licensed under the licenses their communities need.
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Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
I still fail to see the benefits of "open sourcing" Java. How will it be improved? It's not as if the engineers at Sun are stupid and don't know how to engineer enterprise software. Don't you think Sun has heard that same complaint from some major league/big $$$$$ customers and done everything they could to improve said performance?
Even if they *do* open it up, Im sure the slashdot community will still hate them because they don't use a GPL variant license. Its a lose-lose situation for Sun, I don't get why they would even consider it. Is there a business case that will generate a 9-figure revenue jump from giving away the source for Java? I don't see it, but Im sure someone around here will happily clue me in.
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Rarely do the most vocal critics of "open sourcing" something actually understand the rationale behind free software, which is NOT to have the best code, NOT to have the most secure code, NOT to ship a product the fastest, NOT to contribute to the code, NOT to get something for free, or even to become the "commodity" implementation of a specification.
The best reason to "open source" something is purely and simply the freedom to access the code behind the software you are running; the freedom to change, or port to another platform, the software that you purchased or downloaded. This is the original philosophy of the Free Software Foundation, and the GNU project, who were collectively the inspiration for the "open source" movement.
So if you're wondering why anything less than a GPL license is unsatisfactory to the hairy, unwashed free-software factinista, why don't YOU look up the facts and get a clue about the software freedoms that may, one day, mean that your descendants can read e-books, watch movies and examine the collected creative output of humanity unencumbered by the imposed obscurity of closed-source software, DRM and other impositions on our freedom.
Yes, this is about religion. It's about an idealogical divide between people who would rather have free-as-in-beer convenient software, rather than free-as-in-freedom software that preserves your rights. Frankly, your arrogant pragmatism nauseates me.
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Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, that's part of the problem.
Enterprise developers are used to a very particular envelope. That involves putting up with a lot of large-company bullshit and unfriendly tools. People in other environments have different needs that are poorly served by Java. And actually enterprise people have those needs too; they're just used to suffering.
Take all of the C#-inspired improvements in Java 1.5, for example. Many of them are about programmer convenience and improved expressiveness, neither of which mattered much until C# was a threat. Or consider EJB 3.0. EJB sucked for years until Hibernate, an open-source project, came along and beat the snot out of it. EJB 3.0 is basically a straight import of Hibernate.
Or take Ruby on Rails: you can't write that in Java. Why? My theory is that in large companies, they'll let you go away for three months and build infrastructure. Plus, neither Sun nor an enterprise architecture group trusts programmers with the kind of heavy wizardry that Rails uses to make things happen. So again, Sun gets its ass kicked by an open-source project.
If they really open it up, perhaps Sun can harness some of that power. But I'd bet they won't do it properly; Java reeks of "cathedral" thinking, and that papa-knows-best mentality is hard to shake.
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Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Funny)
No no no. Let Sun handle Java.
Why Should Sun Do This? (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM, BEA, Oracle, etc pay Sun to license their source code so they can release compliant JVMs.
So, it should be no suprised the the open *cough*IBM*cough* source community "demands" that Sun open source Java. Guess how much money a certain company would save getting free source code that they're paying to license now? In the same of "the open source community", they'd like nothing better than to get the #1 competitor's hard work for free so they stop having to pay them for it.
The Java spec is open for anybody the re-implement, the source code is viewable by all, and the JDK is a free download. Sun has stated that they won't stand in the way of Apache Harmony or any other open source project that aims for a full open source implementation of the JVM/JDK spec.
So what exactly is the problem?
Re:Why Should Sun Do This? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't have the Sun JDK on my Fedora system by default because of the Sun license.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has been adopting ocaml as the next big language [microsoft.com]. For once, Microsoft is technically ahead of its competitors -- ocaml [inria.fr] (which Microsoft did not produce) is very fast and safe, and from a technical standpoint is much more impressive than C# and Java.
Plus, ocaml can be used as a pure functional language -- such languages eliminate almost all the reason to use (error-prone, difficult to guarantee correctness with) threads. Pure functional code is inherently parallelizable any time the compiler can say "hey, no data dependency here".
Ocaml is picking up quite a bit of steam -- there are a slew of open-source libraries for it out there, it's the only safe language that I'm aware of that provides performance comparable to C and C++, yadda yadda yadda. The INRIA ocaml compiler is open source (though, annoyingly, QPL instead of GPL). The runtimes and the stuff that you stuff into your code is LGPL. I didn't realize that Microsoft was backing it and integrating ocaml support into Visual Studio until quite recently, though. There have been gtk+ bindings for ocaml for a while, but MS may actually be ahead of the OSS world in providing complete ocaml bindings.
If you've never used ocaml before, wait until the first time you break in the debugger at a problem...and then step *backwards* to watch the problem occurring. It's simply delightful.
What's particularly satisfying is that C was well-designed -- for a specific set of systems and circumstances that don't apply to most application software development today. Ocaml is the first language in a long time that I've seen where I can say not just that the language has good ideas, but that it is really well-designed. It's also a lot better-suited to application development than C is.
Gah...sorry. Ocaml gives me the warm fuzzies.
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"Sun should endorse PHP" (Score:5, Funny)
Personally I don't want Java open-sourced (Score:5, Funny)
I am scared...
PHP and Java is oil and water (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon is not LAMP (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon is not LAMP.
Re:Third-Party JVM (Score:5, Informative)
The main reason Java has a terrible reputation (IMO) is/was it's tendancy to hang/lockup/freeze your browser when an applet loads, and general clunkyness with Swing.
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Re:This would help (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, FreeBSD were given a license at no cost by Sun, and any not-for-profit organisation with a need for access to a Sun-maintained compliance test kit can get it at no charge [sun.com]. So it's really just a matter of having the motivation to ask.
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Re:This would help (Score:5, Insightful)
uTorrent is NOT self-contained. It requires the Windows API to run. This part of its footprint is not shown when you look at its memory usage, but that first 256MB of RAM that windows uses is the reason uTorrent looks so small.
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Re:This would help (Score:5, Interesting)
on a more philosophical level, there is already an excellent VM that *can* use all the 8G and then some. it's called linux. using java to build apps because it's easy to program in is like using tonka trucks because those trucks are so much easier to handle than the real thing. after all, why pay commercial driver rates to drive a multi ton truck when you can get you own kids (for free) to 'drive' the tonka trucks.
i learned java back around '95, '96 and was really excited about it then. but after having used it on some really large projects, i have been really really disappointed and came to the conclusion that the only real contribution of the JVM was a serious neutering to most modern advances in the OS.
forget portable programming languages - use a portable OS - linux. and forget the V, use the M (tm).
anyhow, Guy Steel was right. i am looking at lisp right now (mostly for emacs tho).
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