Red Hat Plans Open Source Java

sthiyaga writes "According to a ComputerWire article, Red Hat is in discussions with Sun about launching an open source version of the Java platform. 'There's always been an interest in an open source implementation of Java developed in a clean room that adheres to the Java standards,' Szulik told ComputerWire. 'We're in discussions with Sun. We'd like to do this with their support.'"

Microsoft learned a tough lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

About making their own Java not built to standards and without Sun's support. It looks like RedHat learned it, too.

Native Java

[buckinm]

Having a open-source version of Java should allow swing to be compiled via GCJ. There would no longer be anything holding natively compiled Java back.

Re:Much needed

[Anonymous Coward]

OK i keep seeing this .NET stuff and never ask about it cause obviosly so many know and i'm not in the know. And i admit i'm somewhat behind things sometimes, so obviosly i missed this somewhere. What is .NET exactly?

eh, not likely

[m750]

http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/dev elopment/java/story/0,10801,82286,00.html?nas=AM-8 2286 'Should Java be made fully open-source? The problem with open-source is that [victory] goes to volume, and that's evident in the Linux community today where ISVs [independent software vendors] are qualifying to Red Hat and abandoning everyone else. Why? Because Red Hat has volume. If Java were open-source, Microsoft could take it, deliver it as they saw fit and drive a definition of Java that was divergent from the one that the community wanted to be compatible. And to the victor would go the spoils of that nefarious action. '

sun should go for it

[autopr0n]

It would be a win-win situation for them, and they can use their trademark to protect the 'purity'. I.E. if it's not "Pure java" it can't be called "Pure java". And microsoft seems to have gotten out of the java game anyway, so their corruption isn't much of an issue. I doubt the open source maintainers would allow contributions that would violate sun's standards, and Microsoft would never fork a GPL project since they hate the GPL so much.

And plus, sun wouldn't need to do any of the work themselves :P

Good for the web

[narfbot]

I don't use java with mozilla because it's bloaty and not very open source friendly. This it sometimes a pain though, not having it available. And of course there are those java programs I can never try. Having an open source version with Sun's support will improve the current mess.

Somebody make a current open source shockwave plugin!

RedHat's Rawhide

[thule]

Recently Rawhide had Eclipse and Tomcat in it. I was pleasantly surpised to see Eclipse running on ppc Rawhide! It looked like they were running it against gcc's java, but after reading that article I was possibly mistaken. Did anyone else look at the Rawhide version of Eclipse?

Sun has been serious about it for a while !!

[$exyNerdie]

We are very serious about exploring the open-source route," said Alan Baratz, president of Sun's Java software division, in an interview with Wired News in 1998 !!!! [wired.com]


Also, an Open Source Java Project:
Ant: The Open Source Java Project [onjava.com]

Ant: work in progress [apache.org]

Re:eh, not likely

[nate1138]

I guess that all depends on what license the Open-source version is released under. In reality, Microsoft has already killed client side Java. Fortunately, the server is another animal altogether. I don't know a single Java developer that would ever consider using a MS Java implementation. Lastly, I don't see what volume has to do with MS corrupting an open source Java.

Enlighten me.

Isn't it Kaffe?

[Jungle guy]

According to the Kaffe website [kaffe.org], it is a "a clean room implementation of the Java virtual machine, plus the associated class libraries needed to provide a Java runtime environment. The Kaffe virtual machine is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License."

Why start from scratch?

[jyoull]

So they already have source code that works... tell me again why someone has to start from scratch in a "clean room" to build something that validates against the API ? I must have slept through that part.

Um, Classpath?

[deblau]

The guys over at GNU are already working on this [gnu.org]. The project is called Classpath, it's distributed under a modified GPL so it doesn't contaminate projects it's only linked with, and it's far along already. Most Java 2 classes have been implemented, even though they only claim to be 1.1 compliant.

stupid question?

[kurosawdust]

There's always been an interest in an open source implementation of Java developed in a clean room that adheres to the Java standards..'We're in discussions with Sun. We'd like to do this with their support."

If you're going to do it with Sun's support, then why do you need a clean room? Or, if you're going to do it in a clean room, why do you need Sun's support?

I don't see the need...

[Cnik70]

As a java programmer, I have never found java to be limited as a closed source language. The overall structure of the language is easily expandable and adaptable enough to fit my daily needs. And by introducing a new non-sun version of java leads to the same problems that M$ had with J++ where 100% pure sun java code is incompatible with other flavors. Sometimes I believe that certain things, especially programming languages, are better left untouched by multiple sources. It strengthens the language when it remains uniform.

Was this Larry Ellison's idea?

[Mannerism]

I wonder how long it would take Oracle to turn an open source JVM into an Oracle product in much the same way as they turned Apache into 9iAS.

Re:Blackdown?

[wfrp01]

Also GNU Classpath [gnu.org]. Seems to me that if Redhat wants a free Java implementation, they would do well to contribute to existing effort, rather than starting yet another one.

Open Source less than Open Standards?

[mkc]

Sun Software VP Jonathan Schwartz seems to consider open standards more important than Open Source. See the CNet article [com.com] from a couple of months ago.

Perhaps there's a sense that locking down more of the Java developer market is more important than keeping the intellectual property in the implementation of Java "hidden". Once you put the open source version out, you can hope yours will become the defacto standard. But why go to Red Hat to open the Java source? Couldn't you just open it up yourself?

Maybe Sun just needs a high-volume distributor to developers everywhere. Developers who might use Java more if they didn't have to download it, if it were just there. Who serves up more downloads? Red Hat when they release another version of their distro? Sun when they release another version of Solaris? If you want to reach developers and M$ doesn't want to help [microsoft.com], wouldn't you go for the next largest crowd?

Re:Gosling favors Open-Source Java

[FatherOfONe]

The issue is that RedHat has made a decision to only ship open source software in their distro. So you won't get the good video drivers or a good JVM.

This could easily be solved if they just shipped Sun's JVM with it, and had the installer agree to the terms.

Personally I would love a separate RedHat CD or DVD that had "NON GPL" software. I then could load stuff like a good JVM, and good video drivers.

Re:Gosling favors Open-Source Java

[MagikSlinger]

Newsflash: Microsoft has gone and made a better Java -- C#, and funnily enough they not only standardized it with recognized standards bodies (which Sun has never done with Java), they've also released their own shared source version and have not at all stood in the way of third parties making their own implementations (dotGNU, Mono, etc).

Newsflash: Microsoft patented [slashdot.org] the CRL layer, so all those "third parties" could be toast anytime Microsoft finds them "inonvenient".

Java making progress

[nepheles]

It seems that Sun is recognising that Java in general was in danger of stagnation. Recently, we've had a major push into the mobile phone arena, the bundling of JREs with Dell and HP PCs, SDK 1.5, and now this.

This might well be in reaction to the threat posed by .NET, but it seems that Sun are actively seeking to innovate once again, before .NET has a chance to catch up

And that's, long-term, probably a good thing for the development community

Java is more open than .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the equivalent of "The C++ library" has been standardized for C#. No technology that's used in most apps today, like a web technologies or GUI apps has been standardized.

Meanwhile, Java's JCP process allows open source projects like Apache and JBoss to contribute to the standardization of Java. No part of Java is not standardized this way, and as a result, nearly all JCPs have open source implementations including Tomcat and JBoss. These implementations, more often than not, dominate the field over proprietary implementations.

In short, Java is more open than .NET will every be. Mono is dreaming if it think it can pull .NET way from being a Microsoft technology. When developers use .NET, they look at Microsoft's implementation first, ECMA standards next. If Mono is ECMA standardized and Microsoft does an "embrace and extend" so that it's not, then developers will choose Microsoft's .NET over Mono, even if Mono is "correct".

making the right decision

[yajacuk]

With Ximian's Mono's project bringing the dot Net architecture to the Open Source arena, and Sun's failure to standardize Java, I wonder if Red Hat is making the right decision.

This has been a good idea for a while.

[Captain Rotundo]

It would be so great if there was a open implmentation of java. I know there are groups working on it, but if only sun would get involved then it would have a greater chance of staying current. I've always thought it wouldn't hurt Sun to open up the Java SDK and classes a little, what exactly is the benifit they get from it being closed? The version they released would still be considered the standard regardless of its openess or of potention forks.

Forget GCJ, just think of the advantages to Sun if there was a kernel driver to run plain java natively, if done right, and of course open enough to be compatible it could only bolster java greatly, especially now that .net is a big threat.

I have to admit I like java for some tasks but am apprehensive that the two biggest hyped technologies nowadays are both controlled by a single company each, and both have closed source reference implementations.

Done Before, or done right now?

[CptnKirk]

I personally like this idea. I think that open sourcing Java would allow other projects to take off much easier (I'm thinking gcj, but I'm sure there are others).

However how is this effort different from:

Kaffe - Open Source, way behind the times, in general more annoying that useful, IMO.

Blackdown JVMs - Best Java JVM available for free on Linux (again IMO). Uses Sun's code, has valuable contributions, but isn't maintained by a large group. As far as I know, only a handful of dedicated people, and only one or two are very public.

Also, why would Sun suddenly be willing to Open Source Java now when they weren't before? Have any of the open issues changed?

As far as I know it's a compatibility/brand issue. If Java were open source, anyone could grab the source, tweak it and release their own JVM. If there are a zillion JVMs running around it's possible some won't be compliant.

What about the JCK? It works fine, but you still run into the embrace and extend issue. Someone takes Java 1.4 and builds custom enhancements to support his/her own Javaesque features. Programms written for this JVM now no longer work on a stock 1.4 VM. Is this VM now legal "Java". I think Sun would say no.

What about the Java Community Process? Many anti-fork advocates might suggest just contributing to Java via regular channels. Do these channels work? If not, should they be repaired instead of or in addition to Open Source Java?

Re:Gosling favors Open-Source Java

[RickHunter]

Strangely, this fact seems to be constantly ignored by those driving the .GNU and Mono projects. I wonder why?

Re:Sun's Jonathan Schwartz Opposes Open Source Jav

[fastdecade]

Java may be able to run on hundreds of millions of desktops, but unfortunately it's very complicated and time-consuming for an end-user to download and run a Java app in the same way that they could download and run an executable. Schwartz makes a good point about the MS risk, but there is also the possibility that more open-source involvement will lead to a higher quality platform within the popular operating systems.

To take Java to the next stage, ie mass consumer usage, Sun needs to do all in its power to promote ease-of-install. Java Web Start just hasn't had that impact, to date. Open-source projects may help a lot.

Re:Cool

[TV-SET]

"The best thing about standards is there are so many to choose from."

...and that of course was Andrew S. Tanenbaum, but than again I cannot provide the link to the original. :)

Re:too little, too late

[agslashdot]

"Real competitive advantage" in which market ?

There's no generic real competition advantage - its a very domain-specific thingy.

Real competition advantage in microcontrollers & firmware for cameras will continue to be C & assembler for a long time.

For the wall-street crowd,where every quant analyst has a thousand Excel macros & math models, windows terminals are a reality. Java AWT client on windows is a joke - small set of UI controls, no built-in grid-support, no inter-op with Excel, no built-in charts/graphs, the list goes on. The swing clients are another story - getting a Java plugin installed, huge jar downloads, no versioning - clearing the Plugin cached jars every so often, jeez, I've been thru enuf nightmares.

For that particular subset of users, which btw is a pretty LARGE subset, C# is the real competitive advantage. They give two hoots about a JDBC driver that has to use an ODBC bridge to talk to their local MS Access database. ( Typically, interesting data-sets are extracted from a huge Oracle DB into a much smaller MSAccess DB - like an cache, so that Excel can mathmodel your data. C# taks this notion to a whole new level - notion of disconnected DB-access, where you use an in-memory cache to download interesting tables/rows from your DB, disconnect & operate on that subset, & then sync up your data. Read up on it, its quite original & non-trivial, certainly no "dumb little language trick". )

Re:OT: THANK YOU!

[Dalcius]

"please explain your mind... how exactly is this a major player to .NET??"

C and even C++ are becoming tedious for some folks. While the control is nice (I appreciate it quite a bit), speed of programming is becoming an issue as it portability. With newer languages, the development process is becoming less and less.

This is where .NET and Java come in. Higher level, language interoperable (for Java, think CORBA -- Sun helped with that standard), etc. The "new language market" is a big competition ground and the next "language standard" (yes, ye olde folk, C will eventually be replaced ;)) is being chosen. .NET and Java seem to be the contenders. Please correct me if you see a flaw in my analysis, I haven't discussed this much.

---
"the only community getting any great benefit from an OSS java is the OSS community... surprise surprise."

I guess you're not an OSS programmer? Sun will get a great deal of help out of this one, depending on how workable the new code is with Sun's exising system (or whether Sun switches to this new codebase -- longshot, I know). Currently, Sun has the copyright, but Java is down to a commodity market -- Sun doesn't make much money off of it compared to their servers (akin to Windows vs Office).

Sun won't lose much by opening things up. Sun will, however, benefit from OSS folks going apeshiat and adding new features and speeding things up -- this is likely the only reason Netscape is still in some use at all. OSS has some serious potential, and adding that potential energy to Java might be enough to push it over the top.

Hope that explained it... I'd like to hear back if you have a different view.

Too Late

[shrhoads]

As mentioned before [rhoads.com], Java is already headed to the land of fully open source native cross platform binaries. The fine GCJ folks have already implemented most of the 1.4 JDK with libjava. Throw in SWT and you have the holy grail of open source software applications development. A single code base that compiles to native binaries for Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, etc.

Uh. No.

[Chromodromic]

This wouldn't really change anything about .Net. The people who are forking out the many thousands and thousands of dollars -- and that's no exagerration -- required to go .Net, wouldn't be swayed by open source Java. Moreover, Microsoft touts its ECMA standard really only to wave it in the face of Java proponents. The efforts to open up .Net to open source or alternative implementations, like Mono, have been hindered by Microsoft, not helped. Microsoft doesn't care about open this or standards that. They care about mucho buckolas.

Open Java might have a much more profound effect on the Java community itself. If an effective stewardship and administration of the project could be created, then the Java community might end up with a platform that could change to the well considered desires of its audience, rather than pandering to the business goals of Sun and IBM among others, and encourage some developers to have another look at a platform that has recently come under some careful criticism from its own advocates.

For example, Sun doesn't want macros? Well, you know what Sun, WE want macros, so Open Java implements macros and with a choice between no-macros Sun Java and cool-macros Open Java we see how the majority of developers decide.

Now THAT would be cool.

Re:Gosling favors Open-Source Java

[73939133]

When looking at who holds what patents, you must also look at the past actions of the holders.

No, you should not. You should look only at what rights and obligations are legally associated with the license that you get, and what patents and other intellectual property are known.

Here, we are talking about Java, and the JCP and JSPA don't satisfy me as licenses for an open standard. Furthermore, as a practical matter, there simply is no complete, open source implementation of the Java 2 platform. Overall, that means that Java doesn't pass muster as an open source platform. Whether .NET or Mono are any worse from an intellectual property point of view is irrelevant; this is not an either/or choice between Java and .NET. Just because the .NET intellectual property situation could be even worse than the Java intellectual property situation doesn't mean we should all rush to Java.

Reminds me of a drug dealer: first one is always free.

Well, with Java, Sun is offering the drug ("free-as-in-beer Java for Linux"), together with plenty of broken promises ("we will make it an ECMA/ISO/ANSI standard"). In contrast, Microsoft didn't hand a not-quite-free implementation of .NET to Linux developers and say "here, it's free"; if the Mono developers are digging their own grave by cloning .NET, it's their own fault.

So, it seems to me the "first one is always free" analogy applies more to Sun than to Microsoft.

Re:too little, too late

[deanj]

C# isn't poised to sky rocket as much as you think.

Think about this: I recently talked to a publisher at a tradeshow. He told me that there were getting to be more C# books than Java books. Only problem is, *they're not moving*. Java books are still in demand, and they're looking for more. Not so with C#.

That's not a good sign for C#.

Re:too little, too late

[f00zbll]

furthermore C# has several useful notions ( delegates, boxed types, attribute annotations,assemblies etc ) not in Java.

Ok, sounds like you bought the whole PR pitch hook line and sinker. I can say from first hand experience C# is not all it's advertised to be. C# has some nice stuff like properties, but several important pieces are seriously hobbled for enterprise class server applications.

1. delegates - sounds great on the surface until you realize that writing a multi-threaded/thread-safe application means all calls have to go through delegate. this means for each call to a application running in a dedicated thread, two threads are used. One is used by the delegate. Not only that, for server applications, what you really want is to have direct access to that thread.
2. assemblies - well recently I experience the same old DLL hell with .NET 1.1 colliding with .NET 1.0. Guess what, there are other critical issues like dynamic loading which do not work as well as Java class loaders. In order to dynamically load/unload assemblies, they have to be loaded in a separate appDomain.
3. attribute annotation - is nice, but it's hardly critical. Not only that, if you work with a bunch of VB guys, they are so far from annotating their code that you'd have a better chance of getting an experience Java programmer to use attribute annotation correctly. I annotate my code aggressively to point out design decisions and their impact down the line. I also include suggestions and ways to modify the code should the functional requirements change.
4. thread management using the default threadpool class is weak. There was an article recently in .NET magazine that covered async request handling. The article showed that IIS 6.0 uses the stock ThreadPool, which means improving performance requires writing your own thread pool library.
5. the caching and default threadpool is really intended as an object cache and isn't well suited to complex multi-threaded applications that manage themselves.
6. currently there is no object persistence application or layer in .NET. At first glance it doesn't seem like a big deal until you need to handle concurrent access to shared data across multiple systems. Say you have 100 clients that need to access a webservice. The webservices is load balanced across n servers. If multiple users modify common data, how do you manage it? Do you lock the table and use pessimistic locking, or do you naively say we allow for delay and don't care? There are third parties providing object persistence layers for .NET.
7. stateful application server does not exist in .NET and MSDN states it doesn't plan on providing the support in the near future. For the next several releases the focus is on improving .NET CLR and performance.
8. session replication across n webservers is not supported natively by IIS. The way it's typically done in IIS is to use database sessions. Tomcat 5 will have session replication built in. There are numerous Java application servers and servlet containers that provide true clustering with fault tolerant sessions.
9. database clustering is not available as a stock option in Sql Server 2000 or Sql Server 64bit. Typically you have to setup Sql server in partitions and manage the data access with ADO.NET or DAL. Normally when Sql Server is setup in a cluster like TPC benchmarks, it's a custom embedded module. Ask any Sql Server DBA is real-time replication works reliably in Sql Server?
10. there is no enterprise class messaging server and won't be until Biztalk reaches it's second or third release. If you don't believe me, try to use MSMQ to handle thousands of message per second with tens of thousands of subscribers. It will take 5-8 years before Biztalk can even get close to IBM MQSeries.

.NET has it's advantage like the XmlTextReader. The default XML parser in Jav

Re:Much needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Err... NO... that's not what .NET is all about AT ALL. .NET provides a framework for applications development. The idea is to provide a VM-like layer abstracted from the OS which can be leveraged by .NET enabled languages which compile to IL (byte-code). The framework itself provides a common set of libraries that can be used in a language-independent manner.

The fact is that Java is already dead - SUN is the proverbial chicken with it's head cut off. I spend my professional life working in C/C++ and Java, but in my spare time I'm honing my C# & .NET Framework skills because .NET will roll right over Java in 2-3 years time.

The latest JavaONE had the same air of confidence about Java vs .NET that Netscape had about IE. People forget that Microsoft started as a languages company... and they do languages VERY, VERY well. Java is alive today mainly because of innovations brought to Java by Microsoft.

Re:Much needed

[jawahar]

One more point: The memory foot print of typical JVM is 3.5 MB and that of CLR is 20 MB.

Re:Isn't blackdown OpenSource?

[tuzzer]

As a Blackdown developer I can assure you that the Blackdown port of the JDK/JRE etc. is not open source. I had to sign NDAs for both version 1.1.x and 1.2.x to get access to the CVS repository.
You can download the binaries for free, but the source is not provided. In the past context diffs used to be present for the 'plain' Java source, but this is no longer the case.