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Sun's Java Will Be Free This Year

Posted by kdawson on Mon Jun 23, 2008 05:12 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."
Firehose: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 25 Comments More /

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

    by Techman83 (949264) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:15AM (#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

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

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2008, @05:19AM (#23901073)

    Am I the only one who loves Coldfusion?

    -Jim Bastard

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

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2008, @05:43AM (#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.

  • I hope (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dwalsh (87765) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:54AM (#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, @06:15AM (#23901307)

      You're new to slashdot, then?

    • Re:I hope (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2008, @06:18AM (#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:5, Funny)

      by nonewmsgs (1249950) on Monday June 23 2008, @06:30AM (#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?

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

    by bogaboga (793279) on Monday June 23 2008, @07:11AM (#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.

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

      by Ice Tiger (10883) on Monday June 23 2008, @05:31AM (#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, @05:46AM (#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:5, Interesting)

      by AmaDaden (794446) on Monday June 23 2008, @08:23AM (#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, @05:38AM (#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:two months for rewriting code? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2008, @05:33AM (#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.

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

      by Antique Geekmeister (740220) on Monday June 23 2008, @06:31AM (#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.

    • Re:Obsolete (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Marcus Green (34723) on Monday June 23 2008, @06:32AM (#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)

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