Sun to Fully Open Source Java

Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf brings news that Sun Microsystems will be removing the last restrictions on Java to make it completely open source. Sun wants Java to be easily available for use in Linux distributions. We've discussed the steps Sun has taken to open-source Java over the past couple years. From Yahoo! News: "'We've been engaging with the open-source community for Java to finish off the OpenJDK project, and the specific thing that we've been working on with them is clearing the last bits that we didn't have the rights,' to distribute, Sands said. 'Over the past year, we have pretty much removed most of those encumbrances.' Work still needs to be done to offer the Java sound engine and SNMP code via open source; that effort is expected to be completed this year. Developers, though, may be able to proceed without a component like the sound engine, Sands said.

Kudos to them, I guess

I would pose the following question to slashdot: how has Java being closed source affected you personally, and what effects do you see this having in the future?

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

It has affected me personally by being a pain in the ass to install (back in the day) and more than willing to step on any other Java implementation I may have (more recently - ie blackdown etc...). The main effect this will have on the future is to remove this pain because now the distribution will be able to include it in their repositories, thus accounting for conflicts and dependencies so I don't have to. The only problem is that I now almost never use Java and will actively look for similar programs that are not written in Java to accomplish the same task just so I don't have to deal with Java. Java could have been something 10 years ago. Now, it is too little too late IMHO.

Also, if you read the article, you will see that the new and improved Open Source Java will be missing some features (ie sound). So this isn't so much open-sourcing Java as it is removing the last offending bits that cannot be open-sourced and hoping they will be coded back in.

Just my $0.02.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

I would pose the following question to slashdot: how has Java being closed source affected you personally, and what effects do you see this having in the future?

I don't really care too much about the proprietary-ness of Java. Since I'm not a Linux zealot, I just care that it does what I want it to do. I didn't care that VMWare is proprietary when I tried it out, nor did I care about propriety when I tried out Maya.

I suspect I'm with the majority of /. here, but not with the vocal minority of Linux users (I have to specific Linux users because of the also [very] vocal Apple users.)

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

Since I'm not a Linux zealot, I just care that it does what I want it to do.

Not caring about licensing questions probably means that you've failed to consider them in depth. That probably seems like a very reasonable choice - if you wanted to worry about legal issues you would have gone to law school - but it's also very short sighted.

"Freedom" seems abstract and irrelevant until you find out that the elegant technical solution you want to implement is disallowed by the license of some component you're using. This rarely happens immediately, because you wouldn't have picked a tool if it didn't let you do what you initially wanted, but it comes up pretty frequently when you try to do something that you didn't initially consider.

Examples:

- You design your application using Oracle as the database. $20,000 a server seems fine - until you realize that the whole design would be more elegant if you moved a bunch of logic into the database and replicated it a bunch of times (say... at each client site). But $20,000 * 100 sites isn't in the budget, so you're forced to scrap the best technical solution for legal reasons.

- You design a data entry interface in Flash. The project expands, and it turns out that it'd be more effective if the users used tablets rather than PCs to do their data entry. So you bring on a hardware team, and they tell you that ARM tablets cost 1/3rd what x86 tablets would cost. Sadly, there's no flash player on ARM - and with your budget it would have been a simple port, too.

Far from being irrelevant and abstract, the issue of licensing is directly relevant to anyone selecting software to build anything important (software or any business process). Proprietary licensing means usage constraints - both explicit constraints like the limited set of Flash platforms and economic constraints like the per-server Oracle license fee. Developing on proprietary stuff is like working in a mine field - sometimes you have to do it, but it's sure as hell something you want to avoid.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

Before I bought my Mac in summer 2006, I was a FreeBSD user. At the time, FreeBSD users were not able to download FreeBSD binaries of the latest versions of Java due to a licensing agreement IIRC; instead, they had to either download a binary of the older version, download the Linux binary and use FreeBSD's Linux binary emulation, or download the source code of Java (with a very restrictive license) and compile it, which took a long time. Now that Java will be fully open-source in the near future, life for FreeBSD users (as well as other platforms where Java is unsupported) would be much easier, as pre-compiled binaries would be allowed to be distributed without Sun's permission. A lot of us don't have the time to waste multiple hours compiling software.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

A lot of us don't have the time to waste multiple hours compiling software.

And the rest of us use Gentoo. If this new "open source" Java takes less than a week to compile, I will be extremely disappointed in Sun's efforts!

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

It's ok guys, I'll handle this.

How has Java being closed source affected you personally

I can't count the number of times I've cried myself to sleep thinking of the poor children who blindly agree to arbitrary EULAs which they are incapable of understanding.

What effects do you see this having in the future

Now those children blindly agree to the somewhat less arbitrary GPL which they are incapable of understanding.

This is truly a magnificent day!

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

Hassle, more than anything else, sums it up. Installing the JDK or JRE is never as easy as installing other programs. Some distros won't include Java in their standard package repositories because of licensing constraints. You end up with two maintenance/upgrade processes: one for Java, and one for everything else. It's a pain if you have a lot of machines that need to run java- you're always manually copying around install tarballs and jar libraries that you can't just yum or apt-get out of the appropriate repo. Difficulty in Java installation is also a barrier for simple desktop Linux; at this point, Java should Just Work for any reasonable desktop experience.

I suspect that the closed sourcing is also why support for Java on non-priority systems has lagged behind. It's been a while, but I used to support Java apps that were running on FreeBSD. At the time, the state of Java there lagged behind the big three (Linux, Windows, Solaris) considerably- the latest versions of of the JDK/JRE weren't always available, and when they were there were sometimes weird bugs lurking in them that would cause applications to puke. Support for other languages wasn't anywhere near as far behind because it was much easier for BSD developers to track changes in the source of languages that primarily targeted Linux.

For that matter, despite Suns attempts at making Java a universal platform, support on some platforms has been better than others. My employer bought a 3rd party Java HR application for employees to use for leave/VK time reporting, with the promise that it would work for any system since it's Java (a lot of people have Linux or Mac). No such luck. It's interface is an applet that works on only certain versions of the JRE under windows. Maybe the vendor is just incompetent, but Java is supposed to simplify the writing of cross-platform applications. I strongly suspect that these kinds of problems are a consequence of Sun keeping the source closed: priorities on development of the JRE/JDK had to be constrained by Sun's resources and economic priorities. No matter how enthusiastic the user community on lower-priority operating systems, they couldn't fix problems themselves.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

I would pose the following question to slashdot: how has Java being closed source affected you personally, and what effects do you see this having in the future?

For one thing, we won't have to listen to RMS whining about it [gnu.org] every time someone mentions the current version of OpenOffice.

Re:Kudos to them, I guess

The license issued with the open source Java toolkits (based on the GNU Classpath library) explicitly permits linking with non-GPL modules.

What fate awaits GNU Classpath?

Opensource developers have put an enormous effort into the GNU Classpath Project [gnu.org]which has almost reached 1.0 status and that aims to be a free implementation of the Java class libraries. Indeed, who can calculate the man-years that have gone into this project? I can't believe it will just up and die when Sun opensources Java. Will we have two diverging implementations or will they merge?

jdb2

What,

again?

Will this mean a 64-bit plugin sooner?

Great! Does that mean we might see a 64-bit plug sooner rather than later? We've been waiting over 5 years! [sun.com]

Browser Plugin

I know java is more than just a browser plugin, but maybe now finally I can run Java with my 64-bit browser.

Re:Better late than early

They've open sourced everything they had rights to do long ago. The only parts they didn't was due to stuff they had licensed and had no right to release the source code for. Seriously, how dare they not violate their contracts so that you could get code they had no right to release!

Re:Better late than early

I suspect the poster is alluding to the fact that Sun's decision not to make Java more open from the beginning cost them a lot of position in the market. Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing, and so kept the language under their tight control to prevent it being forked by competitors or used in manners that they didn't approve of. The result was that because of 1) objections to Sun's control of the language, and 2) Sun's priorities in terms of support for certain platforms and not others, Java lost a lot of ground in the back-end space to Python, Ruby, and others, and the space occupied by the applet was essentially devoured by Ajax. Sun was envisioning Java as having a ubiquity in the application space to rival that of C in the systems space, but it hasn't really reached that potential. The decision to push for a closed, tightly controlled language early on is a good part of what caused that.

Re:Better late than early

Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing, and so kept the language under their tight control to prevent it being forked by competitors or used in manners that they didn't approve of.

That's the official story, and it's true as far as it goes. But it's not the whole truth.

The big problem has been Sun's corporate mindset. Until recently, key decision makers at Sun, both on the business side and the R&D site, seriously believed that they were smarter than everybody else, and had no need to listen to anybody else's ideas. That's why Sun stuck with SPARC processors so very long after it became obvious that commodity processors were the future — SPARC architecture is superior to x86, end of discussion. It's also why Sun's first attempt to move to commodity systems (by spending $2 billion for Cobalt Networks) was a total disaster: the Cobalt people couldn't get any respect from the rest of Sun, and quickly moved on. I can think of many other examples.

I was a contractor at Sun/JavaSoft in '98, and saw this attitude all over the place. In some cases, I couldn't get access to the FrameMaker source for key specifications because the spec owners feared "forked" copies of the specs!

The really sad thing is that many of these people were every bit as smart as they themselves thought they were. But their raw intelligence was often wasted, because you need a certain willingness to collaborate to create a real product.

I recently came back to Sun as a regular employee. I like to think this intellectual arrogance is no longer a major problem here. Part of this is the example set by current upper management, which seems to understand the problems I describe. But the big reason: most of the my-way-or-the-highway geniuses have been hired away by Google.

Re:Better late than early

If those people moved to Google, can we then expect Google to become mired in similar internal issues?

Re:Better late than early

Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing

And rightly so considering the last 13 or so years of development in the industry.

Java lost a lot of ground in the back-end space to Python, Ruby, and others

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this remark is probably only true regarding FOSS projects. Looking at this statement from a commercial development point of view is another ballgame entirely.

Job search hits from Dice.com

• Java [dice.com]: 15786 jobs
• Python: [dice.com] 1395 jobs
• Ruby: [dice.com] 757 jobs
• C/C++ [dice.com] 6283 jobs

Lets be honest, the industry as it currently stands runs on Java and .NET. This is not to say that OSS and the languages mentioned above are not gaining ground quickly, but I think its important to keep a historical perspective regarding the status of Java. Java really was/is the Next Big Thing, and it will almost certainly become the next COBOL in terms of the amount of code which will need to be maintained decades from now.

Re:Better late than early

Long ago is a bit of an exaggeration, the first code drop was less than two years ago and the first drop of the majority of the code

Sun was talking about open sourcing java for many years, but it was only fairly recently (december 2006) that they actually annouced the license they planned to use and gave us a little taste of code (not that said code was much use on it's own). and promised all of the JDK "except for a few components that Sun does not have the right to publish in source form under the GPL" would be released by march of the next year

Then when it came we discovered that those few components included serveral major parts of the graphics subsystem. Progress to getting high quality replacements for those components and getting them into the official codebase has been rather slow and is still not complete.

Also it was only last febuary that they opensourced anything from the java6 codebase, before that everything they released was from the java 7 alpha codebase, hardly ideal for production use (though a couple of linux distros shipped the code anyway because they considered it better than nothin).

This article doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know already.

Re:Better late than early

Liar. You have to pay per instance of VisualBasic to even run the compiler. Java's tools (while not as good IDE-wise as VB) have always been available with a $free$ license.

Who cares? We're a company, not a bunch of broke kids, and don't have problems spending money if we need to. "Free as in speech" is much more important to us than "free as in beer", even though the lack of price tag is a nice bonus.

Re:Better late than early

While the ability to maintain something indefinitely (ie, the thing open-source brings to the table) may be a factor, it's far from the only one. And for my money, it should be dead last on the list of things to consider when choosing a language

Dead last?! Spoken like someone who has never been fucked over. Just wait 'til a proprietary compiler/runtimelibrary vendor tells you, "No, we're not ever fixing that. And you can't fix it, either." It's even better when you have to tell the same thing to your client.

Sympathies to the FoxPro guy. I was once a Clipper guy. I don't know whether the availability of maintenance is number 1 or 2 on my list, but it's waaay up there. Never again. Never fucking again will I have that kind of shit in my life. I'll get out of IT and flip burgers for a living, before I write another line of code that has miserably crippled and hopelessly unmaintainable dependencies.

Re:What will happen to GNU Java?

You could argue that if Java goes GPL, gcj has been successful even if it suddenly becomes irrelevant. The same would be true of GNU Gnash if Adobe were to GPL the Flash plugin. It wouldn't invalidate the open source efforts: far from it, it would accomplish the original goal of having a free implementation of the application.

Re:MySQL

You obviously did not read the comments about MySQL posted by MySQL's ex-CEO. They are not taking MySQL away by any means. The core of the product will always be GPL! What they are going to do is to close source some add-ons in order to generate more revenue so they can pay developers who write those things. In other words, if you really want to get some latest gadgets for MySQL, you'll have to pay. That is okay with me. Open Source at its finest :)

Re:This is good news...

It is good news for users of java on linux.

Major distros will ship proper java by default (some already are shipping java builds based on the code sun has released so far with bits from elsewhere to try and plug the gaps) and they will be able to patch it themselves to backport security fixes or fix issues with new versions of libraries (there was a bad one involving sun java 6 and a new version of some library recently, I don't remember the details but I do remember sun took ages to get a fix out).