Open source Java?

Bruce writes "Newsforge is reporting that Java 2 Standard Edition, may soon be set free of Sun Microsystems' notoriously complicated licensing. A group of 12 Apache developers have put together a proposal called Harmony. The proposal appeared as a simple project call last Friday on an Apache incubator mailing list. It would make this new, built-from-the-ground-up version of Java available under the Apache 2.0 free software license. And it's causing quite a stir in the Java community, especially since respected Sun frontmen Tim Bray, Simon Phipps, and Graham Hamilton have given the project their blessing. As yet there has been no reaction from Dr. Java, James Gosling himself, who is in Brazil talking to developers. In a FAQ on the Apache site, Harmony project leader Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: 'We believe that there is broad community interest in coming together to create and use an open source, compatible implementation of J2SE 5, the latest version of the Java 2 Standard Edition specification. While the Java Community Process has allowed open source implementations of JSRs for a few years now, Java 5 is the first of the J2SE specs that we are able to do due to licensing reasons.'"

I was under the impression...

[Anonymous Coward]

That there was an open source java project already, BlackDown. I fail to see what the big deal is here really, and arn't the Java standards open anyways and anybody could just write up an open JVM/Compiler? I mean nothing is stopping anybody on /. (or in the world) from writing say their own C Compiler, or Lisp compiler, or their own Virtual machine software, once you know the hardware of the target system it shouldn't be complicated to get a "working" emulation/compiler. Now for performance you would probably be better off using an existing solution, but thats why we have Sun's Compiler.

Dupes Ahoy!

[jalefkowit]

I liked this story better when it was posted a week ago [slashdot.org].

C'mon, "editors". This has to be getting embarrassing. Right?

Re:Anyone sum up...

[benjamindees]

Seems to be a difference in the way the licenses deal with patent issues [apache.org].

IBM connection

[wrmrxxx]

What makes this slightly interesting is the IBM connection:

Geir Magnusson Jr. is a lead in the proposed Har mony Project

Geir Magnusson Jr. is from Gluecode [codehaus.org], which IBM has acquired.

If it weren't for that, I'd just say "yeah, whatever - it's just another JVM implementation."

Re:I was under the impression...

[k98sven]

Blackdown, Kaffe, GCJ, and quite a few similar "branches", all getting somewhere 60% down the way and stopping there. Somehow I don't quite believe the new project will get anywhere near "usable" as well.

Ok, first Blackdown is 100%. It's not an open source VM. It's a port of Sun's.

Kaffe and GCJ haven't stopped anywhere. Both are using the same class library (GNU Classpath).

Does this [wildebeest.org] look like 'stopping'?

Re:Zzzzzz. Wake me up

[mav[LAG]]

Java is the number one development environment for business applications. Bar none.

Bahahaha. Number one in what? Being slow? Being broken? Being inconsistent? Being verbose? Being a nightmare for sysadmins to manage?

No doubt Java fanboys will mod me down for trolling but I don't really care - the above has been my real world experience of it. Any Lisp or Python programmer worth his salt can code circles around anything written in Java, and it will be written in a quarter of the time and run twice as fast. But of course PHBs have a far better grasp of what language to use than programmers do for some reason.

Haha, nice work mods.

[Some Random Username]

If you aren't going to read the link, don't moderate the post. Its a troll post from a troll weblog.

Miguel's take on Harmony

[Anonymous Coward]

here [ximian.com]

Re:Zzzzzz. Wake me up

[mav[LAG]]

LOL. Yes. Lisp. How about APL? or some other equally retarded language only mathematicians, washed-up AI people & other various people who never got past just being a programmer (vs designer vs software engineer) could love...

I love people who don't know what on earth they're talking about. Lisp has little to do with AI except as an accident of history. Today people use Lisp to write 3D games for the Playstation, complex business applcations, robot controllers for NASA and just about anything in between.

Because LISP scales *so* well.

Well spotted - it does. Steel Bank Common Lisp on my AMD64 compiles to wickedly fast native x86_64 code - actually faster than gcc in some cases.

And has all kinds of useful features like ... eval!!!!

From http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html [flownet.com]:

(Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.)

Yes! the way of the future! RPN & expressing yourself in syntax trees!

Yeah Lisp is the way of the future actually - heh. All other actively-developed languages have only recently added things that have been in Lisp for decades: closures, GC, macros et al. Lisp isn't RPN by the way which shows me how much you really know about Lisp. And you don't typcially write code in syntax trees - you write a domain-specific language in Lisp and then write your problem in that. Reply as yourself if you feel the need - I'd like a good laugh at your previous cluelessness.

Re:I don't get it...

[Wesley Felter]

People wine at Sun "Open Java... Open Java... Open Java...".

Those people are whiners anyway; they have no credibility.

And when they finally look at doing so...

You didn't understand the article correctly. Sun is still not planning to open source their VM.

all I see people saying are things like "We already have GJC, you fuckers... we don't need you anymore".

One benefit of open source is that it makes users independent from vendors. Not needing Sun is very important for some people.

Apache made the political mistake of implying that they'll throw away GCJ etc. and start from scratch, which understandably has people in shock at the sheer hubris of it. (Of course, it doesn't matter whether that implication is true or not...)

Re:Helping out current Java Open Source projects?

[LnxAddct]

A non-free JVM hasn't stopped the Fedora devs. They put together GCJ, which is under very active devlopment, but can compile most java applications including apps that use Swing, AWT, and SWT (I believe it supports SWT but never tried) it supports JOGL too so you can code 3D java apps that run natively. In the next release of Fedora, all of the java stuff in Open Office will be compiled with GCJ, same goes for Eclipse and Apache Tomcat. GCJ is an amazing project and being able to run java as native code is even cooler. Look for all this (plus a whole bunch of other cool stuff) in Fedora Core 4 which should be released on June 6th.
Regards,
Steve

Re:What about patents?

[the eric conspiracy]

What risks would this Apache projects involve with respect to Kodak patents?

The Kodak patent is so broad that it could be used to sue anyone using an object oriented programming language. It is not Java specific. Sun settled with a $92 million payment, Microsoft has taken a license.

Unfortunately it seems to have survived a court test, so it will take a lot to get it declared ivalid. However most people believe that it should be because of prior art going back to the days of Simula.

Re:Zzzzzz. Wake me up

[junkgui]

...foreach... thats your best argument... because the other two just arnt true... public class Speaker { public void callTalk(Object o) { o.getClass().getMethod("talk", new Object[0]).invoke(); } } And threads arnt broken... except that they are still backward compatible with java 1... where they were broken but he methods are depricated and have been for many many years.

Re:Quite a stir?

[radish]

Speaking as a member of the Java community, the reason I don't care about an OS Java (beyond the "oooh neat" factor) is simply that I don't need one. I write Java for work, we need a stable, supported platform to run our apps on. Linux is _just_ getting to where it's useful for us, which is great. Java is there and has been for years. It doesn't cost us anything to run it, we get support, it works. Why again should we replace it?

Re:I was under the impression...

[drew]

blackdown is a community project, but it is not open source, and never has been. blackdown is the original port of the sun jdk source code to linux (and *BSD?), and the source code and binaries are licenced under exactly the same terms as sun's jdk, (which, iirc, essentially *is* blackdown.) in short, binaries are not freely redistributable, and you are severely limited in what you can do with the source code.

Re:Java's biggest hole is in the embedded market.

[btarval]

I agree, but there are quite a number of CPUs which do have the horsepower to run Java. Enough so that the selection of a non-Intel CPU is feasible and reasonable. It is a shame to see people restricted here simply because they thought Java was originally a good choice, based upon their experiences with x86.

I suppose that does give a competitor who knows what it is doing a leg up. But still, the point remains that the lack of Openess with Java is hindering its adoption on a good many CPUs.

As far as the low-end goes, we're starting to see serious strides here. There are now $3 32-bit Microcontrollers appearing. Granted, the horsepower is only on par with the 1990 CPU's. But if Moore's law holds, we should see Java capable CPU's in this space within 10 years (assuming Java doesn't get horribly bloated).

Gluecode not connected

[mparaz]

Geir Magnusson Jr. replies here [theserverside.com]:

Apache Harmony has nothing to do with Gluecode. Gluecode focuses on Java application servers. It has nothing to do with J2SE implementations, and has no interest in J2SE implementations.