IBM Collaborating With Open Source Java Project

lord_rob the only on writes "According to news.com, IBM has begun participating in the open-source Java project Harmony and intends to contribute code to the initiative, according to a Big Blue executive. At this point, IBM's participation is limited to thoughts on design, but the company has plans to contribute code to the project in the future." From the article: "We really like to see the community get started, and they're still working out the rough edges of what they want to deliver. And we didn't want to disrupt that,"

Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been this interesting and very quiet power struggle within the JCP between Sun and IBM. IBM keeps wanting to assert influence over Java and grow the language/platform in ways that they think would be good. Sun keeps trying to simultaneously

1. keep IBM from taking the language in directions other than Sun wanted to take it in, and
2. make the JCP a democratic and open process whereby any involved company can take the language in any direction they want.

This isn't because Sun is evil or malicious or anything; they're just confused about what they want. They honestly want Java to be an open, democratic standard, and they honestly want to control it.

The "control it" side of things keeps winning, because in the end Sun makes the JVM so they can technically decide what goes in and how it gets distributed.

This is why I think Harmony is interesting. Sun will no longer control the only good JVM, and if Sun can't stay at least as good as Harmony, then Sun will no longer control the primary JVM. This makes the JCP's democratic ideals a lot more attainable because Sun's just lost their biggest degree of control. IBM trying to weigh in on the side of Harmony, given this context, makes a LOT of sense. They can begin to grow the language how THEY wanted again.

This is going to be good for IBM, good for open source, and in the long run good for Sun once they realize that trying to control Java too much isn't really in their best interest.

What about GCJ?

[AnuradhaRatnaweera]

After the FSF call for volunteers [fsf.org], GNU Java compiler / VM has come of age [newsforge.com]. It was reported here [slashdot.org], too. RedHat Fedora Core 4 even includes a native version (doesn't depend on JVM, but runs as a "normal" binary) of Eclipse, compiled with GCJ.

Here we go

[$RANDOMLUSER]

The Richard Stallmans of the world have long wanted Java to be an open source language, while Sun Microsystems has said that they want to be the single point of control for the language. The biug lawsuit between Sun and Microsoft was about Microsoft making unauthorised changes to the language spec. Through the Java Community Process, Sun has allowed developers at large to make suggestions and improvements to the language if Sun approved of them. Sun controls the specification of the language and the reference JVM implimentation. The battle isn't about the JVM being open source, it's about the language specification. Sun's fear is that by opening the specification, someone's going to say "You know, I've always felt the language should have pointers", and the language will fall into Creeping Featurism the way C++ did. The recent (1.5) introduction of template-like behavior, at the demands of the "more features" crowd is already a step in that direction. No matter how you slice it, it seems we're doomed to a Java with more and more new features (remove run-time array bounds checking for performance, anyone?) and more and more fragmentation.

Sun, IBM, and Compatibility.

[reporter]

According to "Sun Lashes Out at Open Source J2SE [vnunet.com]", Sun hates the Harmony project.

Yet, IBM loves it and is now, apparently, committing to it. Once IBM backs an open-source product (e.g. Linux) and ships it to customers, then IBM ensures that the product performs flawlessly. Who can doubt that IBM is a significant contributor to the high-reliability of today's Linux build? The strength of IBM is its commitment to its customers.

What is interesting is that, from a business perspective, there is no need for Harmony to be fully compliant with Sun's closed Java standards. The route to divergence is to (1) define a new language called "Harmony", (2) place it with a standards body, (3) maintain full compatibility with only the current version of Java (in order to support all of IBM's current customers and developers) but deliberately diverge from compatibility for future versions of Java, (4) arrange for IBM to jettison use of future versions of Java and to fully utilize Harmony, (5) generously borrow the best concepts from Java while ensuring that the word "Java" is never used (in order to avoid a lawsuit), and (6) build support for Harmony in GCC. This strategy could work.

C# is a ripoff of Java and is quite popular.

There is nothing magical about the Java name. Just consistently use the name, "Harmony", on this proposed Java variant. Everyone will know that "Harmony" is Java -- plus additional stuff. Even if "Harmony" is only 98% compatible with future versions of Java, "Harmony" could grab the software development if the open-source community backs it.

Re:harmony / kaffe / sablevm

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the sablevm project, who already collaborate with Classpath...

Re:Neat

[mpcooke3]

because in the end Sun makes the JVM

This is something I confess to not really understanding. The IBM java SDK is as good as the Sun one (probably the only other full fast implementation) why don't they release this as open source. I'd always presumed they couldn't open source is due to Java trademark rules but then if harmony is allowed to do it that can't be the reason.

Or does the IBM Java SDK contain code they don't own and they can't be bothered to rewrite it?

Re:Sun, IBM, and Compatibility.

[braindead]

What is interesting is that, from a business perspective, there is no need for Harmony to be fully compliant with Sun's closed Java standards. The route to divergence is...

I think that full compliance is important. There's a world of difference between getting people to use a new VM for an existing language, and proposing a new language.

If Harmony is a fork of Java, then I want nothing to do with it.

Re:Talk about fragmenting the standard...

[Linus Torvaalds]

Talk about missing the point!

The person you are replying to was pointing out that Sun's stance causes fragmentation of the Java platform.

Pointing out that Sun not wanting to fragment the Java platform is entirely beside the point. The best thing they could do to avoid fragmentation would be to make their implementation open-source. Anything else, and it will force many people to create new implementations rather than use Sun's.

answering my own question

[ChristTrekker]

Once I found the Harmony site from someone else's post (hint: it's in the Apache incubator, not a full-fledged project yet), I saw this in the FAQ:

13) Does this compete with Kaffe and Classpath?

People from Kaffe and Classpath are helping start this project! Their experience in the open source VM and class library is invaluable, and they bring problems that the larger architecture community discussion can help solve.

We will have an implementation under the Apache License, but we think of this as complementary rather than competitive. And when we solve a few small license interoperability issues, we expect we'll be able to complement each other even more.

So, it sounds like a cooperative deal between various players. I've been hoping for an OSS JVM because there is no Java for some of the platforms I use. Having a few big-name drivers behind it will definitely help.