Sun to Release Java Source Code

pete314 writes "After resisting for years, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz at JavaOne this morning said that he will release the source code for Java. The company is asking developers to provide feedback on how to best get there and prevent forking and fragmentation."

Misleading Headline

"After resisting for years, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz at JavaOne this morning said that he will release the source code for Java.

BZZT! WRONG! Java source code has been available for YEARS! (And no, I'm not going to bother linking. If you don't already know where to find the SCSL and JRL licensed code by now, you need to pull your head out of your butt and Google it.)

This article is nothing but a blurb that suggests that Sun is looking at Open Sourcing Java. (What the Slashdot pundits have been screaming for, for years now.) Unfortunately, one of OSI's core requirements is forking. So Java will never be able to make the pundits happy. :-/

Re:Misleading Headline

Unfortunately, one of OSI's core requirements is forking. So Java will never be able to make the pundits happy.

Sure they can - there are other ways to pevent forking than in the license. Look at most of the major OSS projects around and you'll see that there is very little in the way of forking - sure minor forks exist but they quickly die. Sun doesn't care about some minor fork of Java that 20 people use that eventually dies, they are worried about a significant competing standard that honestly splits developers between two different platforms. How often has that happened with big OSS projects? Hardly ever. The question is not so much "what can be done to prevent forking" but "what happens that causes a successful fork". The major examples of significant splits in the OSS world would be Emacs/XEmacs, gcc/ecgs, and XFree86/Xorg. In each of those cases the reason for both the fork, and the success of the fork, comes down to the original project stagnating and being unresponsive to change. Avoid that and you tend to avoid significant forks.

Jedidiah.

Re:Misleading Headline

Sun doesn't care about some minor fork of Java that 20 people use that eventually dies

But they DO care about IBM or Microsoft creating a VM that advertises compatbility, but actually pulls the bait-and-switch routine. Remember, Microsoft already tried to pull that routine with the NON-OSS version of Java. It was the license that stopped them. This time, you can be sure that they would stay precisely inside the letter of the law. No Java trademarking, but no compatability testing either. Companies will start to rely on it for its Windows performance, and then Microsoft will start introducing subtle differences. Before you know it, users will blame Sun for being incompatible.

Re:IBM? Microsoft?

Microsoft's probable response to OSS Java, would be to comb through the source code for bugs, and call a press conference to announce "one gadzillion bugs found in open source Java, more probably exist".

I think the last thing Microsoft wants to do right now is to put "lots of bugs == bad" into people's minds.

Re:Misleading Headline

You throw out a couple of scare scenarios here with either Microsoft or IBM making a mess of Java, but as far as I can tell they are just that, wild scare scenarios that simply aren't viable if Sun is at all on the ball. For starters Sun can keep the Java trademark and simply bar Microsoft and IBM from advertising whatever they care to sell as "Java". From there it is a question of exactly how either Microsoft or IBM is going to get their new language and VM (whatever they decide to call it - maybe microsoft will call it C# and .NET; no, wait, they already did that) to be dominant, or at least bootstrap it into being a competing standard. Microsoft can do that, as you point out, by leveraging their monopoly. The thing is they've already done that: C# and .NET. They can do that quite successfully whether Sun opens sources Java or not. So for Microsoft the argument is rather moot. What about IBM? They don't have a monopoly to leverage so they'd have to resort to the nasty tactic of making a better language and VM with better libraries to manage to get it to take off. But wait, they can only do that if Sun drop the ball in exactly the manner I described and let Java stagnate and become unresponsive to change. So we're back where we started. Sun open sourcing Java really isn't going to make a lot of difference unless Sun drops the ball themselves - which is exactly what I originally said.

Jedidiah.

Re:Misleading Headline

what the "pundits" have been calling for is the source code to the virtual machine and the compiler

WindBourne! I'm shocked to hear such garbage from you!

Current "Stable" JVM - <= 1.5 [sun.com] (SCSL)

"Unstable" JVM Branch - 1.6 [java.net] (JRL)

Every, (and I do mean every) story on Java here on Slashdot has contained one of those two links. Most of them contain BOTH. Why? Because the trolls come out in force. The fact that you didn't take the time to look into the matter (I believe I suggested Googling for it) is disappointing and disheartening. :-(

Re:Misleading Headline

It depends on whether they prohibit or merely discourage forking. Indeed, Sun could even go the trademark route with some success, with only the official Sun Java, and specific licensees (such as creators of alternative Java implementations that conform to the spec) being allowed to use the trademark. This is compatible with the GPL. The fact you can't call your fork "Java" doesn't mean your freedom to change and distribute it has been affected.

There's a more interesting issue here. Sun Java is an embarassment to the OSI. Over the last few years, by using a community driven development process, Java has improved leaps and bounds. Essentially, Sun said "What the Open Source movement says is right, except for the freedom part". And given the OSI keeps being at pains to argue that it's merely a front for software freedom, trying to encourage the development of free software by promoting community-driven development processes which, supposedly, rely upon the software being developed to be Free, this really doesn't hasn't helped it much.

Essentially, the OSI says "We must have free software, because free software means a community of interested parties can develop a program to a much higher standard than would otherwise be the case if it was proprietary. We describe this whole thing as "Open Source"."

Sun responds with: "Aha! But Java isn't free, and it too is developed by a community of interested parties, and they've generated a much higher standard of product than would otherwise have been the case if it wasn't developed using a community process. So your argument fails because you don't need software to be free to use your "open source" development model!"

ESR responds with: "You all suck. Set Java free!!!1!"

So why's Sun "open sourcing" Java? I think they're just looking at ensuring the official Sun implementation has wider adoption, by removing licensing barriers. Free software licenses happen to be a great way to get there. Sun wants to get Java "out there", especially with .NET nipping at its heels. The real problem with Sun's strategy hasn't been forsaking the development model advantages of the OSI's "Open Source", it's been that it's harder to integrate the official Sun Java, the reference implementation, with the non-Java world, because of licensing issues.

And as such, I don't think Sun gives a rats arse what the OSI thinks.

FWIW, I wrote about this in my journal [slashdot.org].

Re:Misleading Headline

OTOH you could view it like this:

Sun doesn't support Java on Linux. Open sourcers complain. Now, they do, thanks to open sourcers complaining.

Sun didn't support Java on Linux because of open source pressure. They supported it because Linux was very successful commercially and so needed an implementation of the primary commercial development language - Java.

Sun doesn't support Java on Linux as a tier-1 platform. Open sourcers complain. Now, they do, thanks to open sourcers complaining.

Which is complete nonsense. Sun have supported Java on Linux as a primary platform for a very long time.

Sun doesn't release source code for Java. Open sourcers complain. Now, they do, thanks to open sourcers copmlaining.

You need to have a far better understanding of Linux and Java history.

I really don't think you understand how little open source matters in this respect. Java is already the number one development language in almost all areas of development - open source, server side, commercial application development. Sun has open sourced more lines of code in the past year than any other organisation - the entire Solaris codebase, and now they are doing this for Java. However, unless they deliver the entire source code as GPL directly to Richard Stallman, along with a grovelling apology for ever having doubted the true open source faith, some people will never be satisfied!

Its Simple

Use a spoon. Not only does it prevent you from forking, but its really hard to fragment anything with it.

Less talkin' more openin'

C'mon Sun, we're sick of hearing about the pending open sourcing of Java. Show us the license!

I know, I know, Sun's afraid that Eclipse is going to... well eclipse the sun, but c'mon! make it GPL, retain the trademark and you won't believe the explosion in Java coding you'll see!

Re:GPL'ing java would be bad...

No, thats the LGPL. GPL is everything that extends it or links to it. LGPL is only for the code itself and not linking code. Thats why glibc is LGPL instead of GPL.

You can't prevent it.

That's why they have resisted it for so long. Now it will just be one more thing where there are sneaky, annoying inconsistencies between distributions. Nothing will be "broken", but things will end up being implemented slighly differenty and some portability will be lost.

I guess it doesn't *have* to happen, but there seem to be more than enough people that want to take Java away from Sun that it's inevitable.

C'mon Jeanie! *Please* get back in your bottle!

Jonathan Schwartz at JavaOne this morning said that he will release the source code for Java. The company is asking developers to provide feedback on how to best get there and prevent forking and fragmentation.

Well, as a developer, I will tell you THE one and only way to prevent forking and fragmentation...

Don't release the source code.


Oops.

How to prevent forking and fragmentation

The code isn't going to fork itself. If Sun is doing a reasonable job maintaining the source code, they don't have much to fear from a fork. If they are not doing a good job, a fork would hardly be a bad thing.

Change the title

The title should read "Sun to Open Source Java". The source code has been available for a long time.

Trademark usage.

What I don't get is why Sun have such a hissy fit over supposed Java incompatibilites introduced through forking of free licensed code. What's to stop them preventing people from calling derivitive versions 'Java'? Sun could implement strict compliance testing, a-la UNIX, to ensure that derivitives are compatible, and can license the 'Java' trademark for use by those compatible versions. Problem solved.

You want to prevent forking?

Create a strong community with strong corporate involvement. If somebody does fork the code, the project will either die or be assimilated back into the main branch. Don't worry too much about others, just make sure that Sun will stand behind an official community. And standing behind them also means listening to them, even the ideas that you don't like.

Look at Perl. It's open source, and hasn't really forked. It has, however, evolved.

"Look at Perl."

Just so I fully grasp your analogy, do you mean Perl < 6.0, which was damnably hard to read, or Perl >= 6.0, which will be impossible to understand?

Re:You want to prevent forking?

Take a feature like generics. There were at least two implementations (Pizza, GJ) available a couple of years before JDK 1.5. That's a fork that could have happened easily.

There are also raging debates over how certain numerics extensions should be done. You could argue that a minor fork has already happened with logging. Some people have a strong preference for Log4j over the Java API.

You get three or four examples of good but different forks, and Java as a stable, uniform platform could be in trouble.

You can only use the term "Java" if you pass tests

Anyone can use the code. You can only call yourself "Java" if you hit certain specs and pass some tests. In other words, if you can prove that you meet the Java standards (with API support etc), you can call yourself Java and use the source code. If not, you aren't Java. Feel free to use the source code.

This may not be a GPL license, but that's alright.

Is there any reason why such an approach wouldn't work?

Criteria #1

Whatever 'how' you come up with must satisfy one simple criterion: make it possible for the major Linux distributions to include the Sun JVM, runtime (tailored to whatever degree necessary to work well,) and source, in their product.

Just don't break it, please

Although the source for the reference platform has been available for some time, the fact that it may become 'free' means forks are inevitable, and that's the only thing that's missing from Java, namely the freedom to fork it. Mind you, if the C++ crowd get hold of it that's what it will be... completely forked.

Java and the DISPLAY variable

My favorite Java feature is that it works well when you export the DISPLAY.

Some excellent examples of this are
Java in Mozilla, OpenOffice, Veritas NetBackup and UGS TeamCenter products.

I too think that it's important that Java does not get forked.

Oh well, that my 2 cents.

The Media Is Retarded

"""A group of developers could split off from the main Java community and form a second, independent group that follows an independent course. This could lead to confusion with developers and cause Java to lose focus.""" Am I the only one tired of hearing nonsense like this? Java has already been forked. Multiple times. There are already open source implementations of both the VM and the base class libraries. These implementations are distributed by default in most big Linux distributions: RedHat, Ubuntu, at least. I know. I started the port of Eclipse 3.0 to Ubuntu/Debian. It runs on GCJ and Kaffe or IKVM. All very high quality *FREE AND OPEN SOURCE* virtual machines. It uses Classpath as it's base class libraries. Exactly what more is there to fear? There are ALREADY other entities out there who have "forked". Why don't most people realize this?

Why is this a surprise?

Whereas I'm not surprised that Slashdot is bringing out the normal anti-Sun's-attitude-towards-Java dogma, is this really a surprise? Jonathan Schwartz is closer to being a pro-Slashdot geek than Scott McNealy ever was. If anything, McNealy was just an arrogant ass who liked staying in his ivory tower with Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. Schwartz has always shown to be more of a geek than McNealy, and releasing the source code to Java has been a "cry of the geeks" for a long time.

(Note that I don't use "geek" derogatorily as I fondly consider myself to be one.)

Sun is giving us a ton of surprises in the past few years with Schwartz on board - from AMD processors to their first, AFFORDABLE powerhouse workstations (Ultra 20). I'm not surprised by this move at all, but I also don't blame them for wanting to be able to protect one of their revenue streams. At least Sun is trying. I guess the Slashdot "make it free or forget it" is still too strong, based on the responses I've seen so far in this thread. Looks like when it comes to Java, Sun is damned whether they do or don't. Pity.

I can hear it now...

Cue the slashdot crowd, with cries of, "IT'S NOT ENOUGH!"

okok, but why

Don't get me wrong, I'm all pro-FOSS, still... We have this: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/source_license.html [sun.com] and I don't see how this "new" turn of events will further help Java. I think it will be like with OO.org, it's open still, only a handfull of devs care about it for various reasons. I really like Sun as a company and as a source of hw and sw (no, I'm in no way affiliated or related) and I hope this turn will be in the right direction.

How? Three words:

General Public License [gnu.org]

Seriously, there's a reason it's so popular. It ensures that noone can hijack the project and the source code will be legitimately free. You will make the most people happy with your decision if you go that route. Anything else will be seen as hedging your bets.

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]

When and If this happens...

Are the various demagogues of Open Source going to track how the new license helps Java grow?

I'd say that this is a classic situation where Java will not be the only thing worth studying. Once the license is decided and the code is even more out there for even more possibilities will we see IBM do even more with it? Will we see schools teach more Java because it has passed open source muster? Will this help it gain market share? Force M$ to open its languages? What about a new free Delphi?

I hope everyone, including Sun, is pleased with the outcome of this. Its not everyday such a big player takes this step. What do people think will happen?

We'll have to see. :)

LS

forks are good

if people didn't like 'em, they wouldn't happen.

Twenty years ago people were all the time telling me that the biggest problem with unix was all the different versions, nobody was ever gonna use it if they couldn't be certain tht the version they picked will still be around in ten years. They were for the most part MVS bigots (or CDC cybernaughts).

I've heard a lot of the same stuff 'bout linux, mostly from windows washers.

This talk about forks doing harm to java is pretty much the same type of FUD.

I just see Emily Latella saying "Forks are good! I think there should be more forks. Just imagine how much more the Chinese could have contributed if they hadn't spent so much time fumbling around with those chopsticks..." Finaly, Chevy leans over and whispers "fork me"

YES

I can't wait to make the Javalord JVM. Soon the internet will be overrun with craplets that only work on my JVM. MUHAHAHA

In other news..

Duke Nuke'em forever will release their source code....

Open Source? Nah...

I don't care one bit about Sun Java as open source. Sure, it could be nice, but do you really think that a great number of amazing programmers would eagerly step up and immediately start to maintain and improve Java? And in that doing a better job than Sun & JCP is doing right now? Don't think so...

However, there is one thing Sun could do... one very important thing: remove the stupid click-through license on downloading the Java source-code. That one thing would mean that the BSD portstree or Gentoo portage could build Java from source - unsupervised. Today it's a total pain to manually download a bunch of distfiles. Even the patches can't be distributed without a click-through license. That sucks.

But then ofcourse, legal redistribution of Java binaries wouldn't hurt either...

But Open Source Java? Nah... Not really needed.

At this late date, who cares.

Seriously, at this late date in the game who cares anymore what Sun does? Those who care not for Freedom have already adopted Java and those who care are either using another language or are now firmly in the GCJ camp and, knowing Sun, won't leave for any bait & switch offer from Sun. I mean, raise your hand if you believe Sun's offer to "open source" Java will actually become a code dump under an OSI approved license. And the odds of it's license (and you can bet your last dollar it WILL be Yet Another License) being GPL compatible are null.

Even today's new initiative to loosen the binary license to permit distribution repackaging is being being greeted by a certain amount of scepticism just because it is Sun. Personally I'll believe it is for real (as opposed to a deal for certain select popular distros, much like the Firefox trademark bullcrap) if jpackage.org can finally ship a binary rpm.

TeX

I think that the reason Java doesn't want forking is to make sure that a program one person writes will always work on all Java interpreters. Sounds familiar to Knuth's concepts about TeX. The way they achieved it was by prohibiting new derivatives from being released under the same name (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#License [wikipedia.org]) and those using TeX in their name must pass a rigorous test suite. The license is not GPL compatible, but perhaps Java could adopt something similar?

Still has Unacceptable Terms!

Sun also grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free limited license to reproduce and distribute the Software, directly or indirectly through your licensees, distributors, resellers, or OEMs, electronically or in physical form or pre-installed with your Operating System on a general purpose desktop computer or server, provided that:
(...)
b) the Software is distributed with your Operating System, and such distribution is solely for the purposes of running Programs under the control of your Operating System and designing, developing and testing Programs to be run under the control of your Operating System;

So no Java for other software developemtn, Ubuntu can only distribute for software made that only works on Ubuntu.

c) you do not combine, configure or distribute the Software to run in conjunction with any additional software that implements the same or similar functionality or APIs as the Software;

So Ubuntu can't package it in such a way that gcj and java reside on the same system (forget alternatives)

you agree to defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages, costs, liabilities, settlement amounts and/or expenses (including attorneys' fees)

So Mark Shuttleworth must have been quoted before reading. Sorry Mark, Sun tried to fool you and the Free Software community!

At this time, I stopped reading the license [java.net] as it's irrelevant. gcj is turning proprietary java irrelevant by the day.

GPL + DFSG compatible

A meaningful license would be a GPL and DFSG compatible Open Source license. Anything else is just jerking the community around and won't change the resistance to Java, or could cause forks.

forking is good

because it will condem java to the obscurity to which it deserves to go.
everytime java activates, my computer slows down.
why shd i put up with this ?

Why is Linux forking considered a bad thing?

The freedom to fork the Linux kernel has resulted in varieties of Linux running on all sorts of platforms, including many that that the mainstream kernel development team has absolutely no interest in.

That's the beauty of being able to fork the code -- people can use it as the basis for scratching their own itch.

The freedom to fork Linux distributions has resulted in something that most markets identify as "competition", something which the x86 desktop OS market hasn't seen in some time.

In spite of Sun's touching concerns, this can actually be a healthy situation, and usually is.

I suppose this will end Java innovation for me

Personally, I'll probably stop at a near-future release and not go forward. I'm guessing I'm not the only one.

I expect java will fork a few times, then the forks will fork. It will quickly descend into dozens of incompatible custom builds while those who want to get work done stick with 1.5 or 2.0 or whatever sun ends with.

I imagine an official sun build going forward for a while--pulling along behind it an ever-increasing pile of hanging-on junk projects. Eventually it will lose it's steam because of the fragmentation of the user base and the requests to "Keep up" with features in these side versions until it grinds to a complete halt.

All this time, committees will be adding "Features" that sun has been holding off on. Features that might save a programmer two keystrokes or allow some trixy maneuver while sacrificing "just a little" readability (like Generics did--IMO sun is already moving too fast!).

I guess now I'll start the search for the next beautiful language that can pull itself up above the fray--above the garbage that is the syntax of Ruby, C++, VB and all these other pretenders.

I suppose that it is possible that Sun will manage to keep control over the language definition via licensing, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

It's been fun.

fragmentation is the point of open source!

There is no way to prevent fragmentation. Open source projects fragment when a single code base can't serve every community anymore, or when the people running the project are screwing up. That's a good thing. Giving users the freedom to fork an open source project when they choose is what open source is all about. The concept of open source without the ability to fork and fragment doesn't make sense.

Sun is right to fear fragmentation; the minute they open source Java, they will lose control. Personally, I think that's a good thing for Java. but Java zealots disagree. In any case, I stopped worrying about it. It's taken Java only 10 years for its spectacular growth, but it can disappear even more quickly than it has grown. if Java continues along its current path, it will collapse under its own weight and become irrelevant in 5-10 years.

good move

i think this is a great idea. one of my biggest annoyances with writing java apps has been that if i ever wanted to release my programs and didn't want to make any assumptions about my users (mainly that they had any version of java already installed on their system let a lone a level of java that matched my own level) i would have to deploy a very heavy 50MB JRE with my 100K app... i think with the opening of the java source, much like in the linux world, someone will repackage the JRE and just keep the very bare-bones essentials so that instead of deploying a 50MB+100K apps i can deploy a 5MB+100k app.

--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

at last!

I will finally be able to run Tomcat on my NetBSD/mac68k box without waiting for Kaffe to mature. Hooray!

Use Ada's model

A "fork" will happen no matter what. What needs to be prevented in an incompatable fork that is non-standard Java. They need to prevent others from taking over the standard. One way that has worked is the way Ada did it. There are many Ada compilers (including the Open Source gcc Ada front end) but the language spec for Ada is closely followed by everyone. What they should do is hold onto the trademark but offer to let anyone use it whos Java implementation passes a large test suit. By "large" I mean something like a 100,000 lines of Java code. Should there ever be a problem they can extend the test suite. After all the whole point of OSS it so people can change the software. The first time one guy checks it out of CVS and make an edit you have a "fork" but hopefuly these get checked back into the main brabch after so testing

Why now?

So, after resisting for years, let's see what is happening [kaffe.org] in the GNU world to change Jonathan Schwartz mind

Fragmentation won't happen

Perl, Python, Ruby, and so on. All are Open Source yet not fragmented. Look at TCL, though it lacks a "dictator" like the others above, it still has not fragmented.

Uh, am I missing something?

JAVA source code has been freely avaible for many years now [sun.com]. If that wasn't that case, you wouldn't be able to for example, build the native FreeBSD JDK...

The goal is to get Java included in Linux distros

Sun's press release [sun.com]
Offical Sun JDK Distros Project [java.net]
Like a lot of people are already saying, you've been able to get the JDK source code for a long time now. The goal here is to fix the things that keep most Linux distro from including a JRE/JDK.

Bugfixes!

Now we can start contributing bugfixes for the long-standing bugs in the standard API.

Well, we could always contribute them. But hopefully now they'll actually get applied.

The next OpenOffice.org will bundle its own Java

They already bundle everything they can, except for the C/C++ compilers (but including their own copy of STLport).

I'm confident, it is only the Sun's restrictive licensing, that prevented them from bundling Java as well. Not any more...

Of course, you will still be able to use the already installed Java using the --with-system-java switch, but it will subtly break various things, because the OO.o's automated builds would never use it themselves.

It's all in the Money, Honey

...release the source code for Java

The company is asking developers to provide feedback on how to best get there and prevent forking and fragmentation.

Well essentially, they want to stay in business - and don't want to give away code for free to competitiors. What if IBM/MS/any_other_company takes their code, repackages it and calls it "Their-Own-Kawa(TM)"? Their lead in the business as the premier Java would be lost.

I think they're thinking at it, purely from a business point of view. And it wouldn't help if the Chinese get a whiff of it (no offence intended).

More fragments

Get ready for the fragmentations! Here comes FreeJava, NetJava, OpenJava, JavaOne, FreeJavaOne, NetJavaOne, OpenJavaOne.. JavaFree, JavaOpen, JavaOpenFree, JavaFreeOpen..

Re:Oh, dear lord

That would explain why the lines are long at Starbucks... the employees drink Java. As long as they get the whip cream in with my grande mocha, I really don't care.

Huh?

Java offers nothing useful or exciting compared to what's out there.

What else is *out there*? c,c++,C#, Visual Basic, Python? If your going to tell me its terrible, I certainly understand that point of view, please at least tell me what you cosider to be better and what applications you have in mind. Just telling me its bad and not good for much, doesn't help much.

Any suggustions to what is out ther that holds such great advantages to Java?

Re:Huh?

Well, for one thing, it is slower than native code.

Patently false. [blogs.com] It has been false for years now. Ever since Chris Rijk published his earth shattering [aceshardware.com] benchmarks. (More recent benchmarks here [improve-technologies.com].)

It's now down to the skill of the programmer. A good programmer will write speedy code, and a bad programmer will write garbage. Who'da'thunk?

For another, its garbage collection has a tendency to result in really bad performance stalls

When was the last time you used Java? 1.1? The modern hotspot JVM uses a generational collector which should NEVER stall during runtime unless it begins running into memory pressure. Go try this game [javaunlimited.net] and tell us how many stalls you see. If you think that's too "simple", try this one [wurmonline.com].

For another, its portability has been hampered by not fully supporting interesting OS features, which means that there are all these OS-specific extensions to add things like audio support,

Is there something wrong with the javax.sound packages? I'm REALLY thinking that you haven't tried Java since 1.1.

They don't integrate well with other apps, don't do a good job of supporting OS services, etc.

Psst! [java.net]

Finally, Java makes it hard to add debug functionality into your code without a performance hit.

That's just a weak argument. Debugging info can really screw up a codebase and should be removed after debugging. But if you're wedded to the idea, get one of the three billion preprocessors [google.com] that are available.

The bottom line is that pretty much any compiled language has great advantages over Java.

The bottom line is that you haven't used Java since the days of 1.1, but you feel that you're fully qualified to make statements about a platform you know nothing about. Whether you intend to or not, you are trolling, sir. So I would ask you to stop spreading FUD by not commenting on Java until you are again familiar with the platform.

Re:Not such big news after all...

IANAP(rogrammer), but I can see how it would make a variety of things possible within the open source community.

For instance, if one knows exactly how Java works, one should be able to make code intended for a Java VM compile into native binaries. That means that every Java app out there, and there are a lot, should be able to run much faster and in native windowing environments within Linux - and that Java code written natively for Linux would also be (somewhat) portable between platforms using VMs.

Again, I'm not a programmer, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Java is written in...

Java is written in Java

Really? Not in C/C++? How do you get the first compiler to run on a new architecture? Probably a cross-compiler.

(Not a troll: genuinely curious & ignorant)

Re:Get your forks ready....

IBM already has their own cleanroom JVM. Anyone who HASN'T already seen the Sun JVM source code can write their own JVM (and there are already some opensource ones). It's all just a matter of manpower.

Re:Not such big news after all...

Even in this here Slashdot page, I see the java tag used all over the source code for this page.

For the bazillionth time, Javascript is not Java. I can't believe there are people on /. who don't know this.

Re:All true.

you get the slow startup times associated with JIT, and slow execution due to fiddling with bytecode. Let's not forget that the only type of optimisation carried out on the bytecode is peephole optimisation, which is inadequate for the majority of I/O intensive operations. The list goes on and on.

While the following benchmarks are somewhat biased, they fairly reflect the speed of the previous generation of Sun's JVM. The latest one (5.0) improves upon this.

http://kano.net/javabench/ [kano.net]

Java's not the perfect tool for everything, but in my experience, it's great for making server applications that need to be reliable, maintainable, and fast, in that order. This is roughly the order in which many businesses need their software to be.

Re:All true.

... Java['s] (admittedly already very poor) uptake ...

You are delusional. Like or dislike the language, but it's had the fastest, strongest uptake of any language in the history of programming languages. It went from zero in 1994 to being almost neck-and-neck with C++ by 1998. In other words, it did in four years what C++ took nine to do, more if you amortize some of C's growth into C++'s history.

Popularity isn't everything, but don't try to say Java isn't popular. Do some searches on some job sites and see how many Java programmer jobs there are.

you get the slow startup times associated with JIT, and slow execution due to fiddling with bytecode. Let's not forget that the only type of optimisation carried out on the bytecode is peephole optimisation

Now you're just trolling. Slow startup time: sure. With the jdk 1.3, you had around an additional 700 ms. startup time penalty that you didn't have with C code; since then, it's gone down. These hundreds of milliseconds are enough to make Java a bad choice for a program like "ls" which gets run constantly, but is irrelevant for server use.

And the fact that little optimization is done on the bytecode ignores the huge amount of optimization that the hotspot compiler does; optimization that in some cases a statically optimized language like C++ cannot do.

Re:Get your forks ready....

Look at SWT and eclipse and you'll see just how much they have accomplished without the source code.

Eclipse is OK, but SWT is now a largely discredited waste of time.