Sun to Fully Open Source Java 374
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.
WARNING LAST MEASURE (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Kudos to them, I guess (Score:5, Informative)
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:Better late than early (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Kudos to them, I guess (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Java trap is ended for this software. (Score:2, Informative)
I run only free software on my computers, so Sun's implementation of Java software was unavailable to me. I used other Java software as needed but I largely simply did without Java. The Java Trap [gnu.org] has ended for this software (similar non-free dependency traps exist for other software). I think what Sun is doing is a fine thing and I look forward to trying Sun's newly liberated Java software.
Re:What fate awaits GNU Classpath? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kudos to them, I guess (Score:5, Informative)
Will this mean a 64-bit plugin sooner? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Kudos to them, I guess (Score:4, Informative)
And the reason for that is that Sun grants special permission to Linux and OpenSolaris distributions to do so under the DJL [java.net]. From the FAQ [java.net]:
See FreeBSD listed there? Have a look around the site, every single mention of operating systems permitted under this agreement is specifically scoped to Linux and OpenSolaris only. That's why Ubuntu has a head-start on FreeBSD, not because they are better at packaging.
Re:Kudos to them, I guess (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Better late than early (Score:5, Informative)
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
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:MySQL (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Kudos to them, I guess (Score:4, Informative)
You talk about "trouble competing" - it hasn't had to compete. There is no choice, in the minds of management everywhere. It has been a massive, enormous success (measured in terms of penetration) in the enterprise, and there are so many lines of deployed Java running everything from corporate IT to banking to network management systems that it is truly astounding. Most of it sucks, of course, but my point is that your comment implies Java is on shaky ground in terms of acceptance, and that is totally naive, particularly in the corporate world. When I go to meet clients about projects, there is no debate about which language we're going to use, unfortunately. It is a de facto corporate standard.
And even for the web front ends, I see GWT getting more and more popular, so who knows. When Google makes their contractors use a particular technology, it tends to leak out and get deployed all over the place as those contractors become enamoured of it.
Re:Better late than early (Score:5, Informative)
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:Kudos to them, I guess (Score:1, Informative)
See pkg_add(1), or 'cd
No one says you have to compile from source all the time on FreeBSD (even though that's what most people seem to do).
Re:What will happen to GNU Java? (Score:3, Informative)
That's not exactly the story I've gotten from these guys. Directly from ARM 2 years ago in regard to my many inquires about getting specs for jazelle to build a VM for my nokia 770:
"Enabling Jazelle is something that is done by the Java VM and OS, and ARM have worked with many handset vendors and Java platform vendors to ensure this happens as widely as possible, investing many 10s of man years into the Jazelle software enabling technology. If your device does not already enable Jazelle, I suggest you talk to the vendor about this. Please note, the license between ARM and Sun for Java technology is based on the Sun commercial license and not on a GPL license."
It's greed plain and simple. I wasn't asking them for a Sun JVM, just hardware specs to apply to a small free JVM. It's not good enough that you buy the hardware and want to use what you own. You have to pay them again to actually utilize all the features of the chip.
ARM can go to hell.
Re:Better late than early (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, huh. A quick reality check over at dice shows number of jobs for java = 15831, number of jobs for python = 1396, number of jobs for ruby = 759. The same search over at Monster shows number of jobs for java > 5000, number of jobs for python = 1256, number of jobs for ruby = 663.
Did we forget about this [news.com]?
AMD64 users rejoice (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Better late than early (Score:1, Informative)
You mean Flash.
Re:Better late than early (Score:3, Informative)
Python is dynamically, strictly typed.
Yeah, we had been seriously considering rewriting our core business logic modules in JavaScript.